Class 




Mi..Vt5A5. 



Copyright )j?. 



COPXRIGtiT DEPOSm 



IN THE FOURTH YEAR 



% Mr. WELLS has also written the 
following novels: 

LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM 

KIPPS 

MR. POLLY 

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 

THE NEW MAOHIAVELLI 

ANN VERONICA 

TONO BUNGAY 

MARRIAGE 

BEALBY 

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS 

THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN 

THE RESEARCH IMAGNIFIOENT 

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH 

THE SOUL OF A BISHOP 

^ The following fantastic and im- 
aginative romances: 

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 

THE TIME MACHINE 

THE WONDERFUL VISIT 

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU 

THE SEA LADY 

THE SLEEPER AWAKES 

THE FOOD OF THE GODS 

THE WAR IN THE AIR 

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

And numerous Short Stories now collected 
In One Volume under the title of 

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 

If A Series of books upon Social, 
Religious and Political questions: 

ANTICIPATIONS (1900) 

MANKIND IN THE MAKING 

FIRST AND LAST THINGS 

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 

A MODERN UTOPIA 

THE FUTURE IN AMERICA 

AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE 

WORLD 
WHAT IS COMING? 
WAR AND THE FUTURE 
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING 

f And two little books about chil- 
dren's play, called: 

FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS 



IN THE 
FOURTH YEAR 

ANTICIPATIONS OF A WORLD PEACE 



BY 

H. G. WELLS 

Author of "Mr. Britling Sees It Through," 
"Italy, France and Britain at War," etc. 



naeto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1918 

AU rights reserved 






OOPYSIGHT, 1918 
By H, G. wells 



Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1918 



MAY 22 1918 

©GI.A497408 



PREFACE 

In the latter half of 1914 a few of us were writing 
that this war was a " War of Ideas." A phrase, 
^^ The War to end War," got into circulation, amidst 
much sceptical comment. It was a phrase powerful 
enough to sway many men, essentially pacifists, 
towards taking an active part in the war against 
German imperialism, but it was a phrase whose 
chief content was its aspiration. People were al- 
ready writing in those early days of disarmament 
and of the abolition of the armament industry 
throughout the world; they realized fully the ele- 
ment of industrial belligerency behind the shining 
armour of imperialism, and they denounced the 
" Krupp-Kaiser " alliance. But against such writ- 
ing and such thought we had to count, in those 
days, great and powerful realities. Even to those 
who expressed these ideas there lay visibly upon 
them the shadow of impracticability; they were 
very " advanced "' ideas in 1914, very Utopian. 
Against them was an unbroken mass of mental habit 
and public tradition. While we talked of this 
" war to end war," the diplomatists of the Powers 
allied against Germany were busily spinning a dis- 



vi PREFACE 

astrous web of greedy secret treaties, were answer- 
ing aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing 
in the treacherous violence of Germany only the jus- 
tification for countervailing evil acts. To them it 
was only another war for " ascendancy." That was 
three years and a half ago, and since then this " war 
of ideas " has gone on to a phase few of us had 
dared hope for in those opening days. The Eus- 
sian revolution put a match to that pile of secret 
treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of 
the Allies; in the end it will burn them all. The 
greatest of the Western Allies is now the United 
States of America, and the Americans have come 
into this war simply for an idea. Three years and 
a half ago a few of us were saying this was a war 
against the idea of imperialism, not German im- 
perialism merely, but British and French and 
Russian imperialism, and we were saying this not 
because it was so but because we hoped to see it 
become so. To-day we can say so, because now it 
is so. 

In those days, moreover, we said this is the " war 
to end war,- ^ and we still did not know clearly how. 
We thought in terms of treaties and alliances. It 
is largely the detachment and practical genius of 
the great English-speaking nation across the Atlan- 
tic that has carried the world on beyond and 
replaced that phrase by the phrase, " The League 



PREFACE vii 

of Nations/' a phrase suggesting plainly the or- 
ganization of a sufficient instrument by which war 
may be ended for ever. In 1913 talk of a World 
League of Nations would have seemed, to the ex- 
tremist pitch, " Utopian." To-day the project has 
an air not only of being so practicable, but of being 
so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane 
thing before mankind that not to be busied upon it, 
not to be making it more widely known and better 
understood, not to be working out its problems and 
bringing it about, is to be living outside of the con- 
temporary life of the world. For a book upon any 
other subject at the present time some apology may 
be necessary, but a book upon this subject is as 
natural a thing to produce now as a pair of skates 
in winter when the ice begins to bear. 

All we writers find ourselves engaged perforce 
in some part or other of a world-v^dde propaganda 
of this the most creative and hopeful of political 
ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness 
of mankind. With no concerted plan we feel called 
upon to serve it. And in no connection would one 
so like to think oneself un-original as in this con- 
nection. It would be a dismaying thing to realize 
that one were writing anything here which was 
not the possible thought of great multitudes of 
other people, and capable of becoming the common 
thought of mankind. One writes in such a book 



viii PKEFACE 

as this not to express oneself but to swell a 
chorus. The idea of the League of Nations is so 
great a one that it may well override the preten- 
sions and command the allegiance of kings; much 
more does it claim the self -subjugation of the jour- 
nalistic w^riter. Our innumerable books upon this 
great edifice of a World Peace do not constitute a 
scramble for attention, but an attempt to express in 
every variety of phrase and aspect this one system 
of ideas w^hich now possesses us all. In the same 
way the elementary facts and ideas of the science of 
chemistry might conceivably be put completely and 
fully into one text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it 
is far more convenient to tell that same story over 
in a thousand different forms, in a text-book for 
boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, 
for adult students, for reference, for people expert 
in mathematics, for people unused to the scientific 
method, and so on. For the last year the writer has 
been doing w^hat he can — and a number of other 
writers have been doing what they can — to bring 
about a united declaration of all the Atlantic Allies 
in favour of a League of Nations, and to define the 
necessary nature of that League. He has, in the 
course of this work, written a series of articles upon 
the League and upon the necessary sacrifices of pre- 
conceptions that the idea involves in the London 
press. He has also been trying to clear his 



PREFACE ix 

own mind upon the real meaning of that ambiguous 
word ^' democracy/' for which the League is to 
make the vv^orld " safe." The bulk of this book is 
made up of these discussions. For a very consider- 
able number of readers, it may be well to admit here, 
it can have no possible interest ; they will have come 
at these questions themselves from different angles 
and they will have long since got to their own 
conclusions. But there may be others whose angle 
of approach may be similar to the writer's, who may 
have asked some or most of the questions he has had 
to ask, and who may be actively interested in the 
answers and the working out of the answers he has 
made to these questions. For them this book is 
printed. 
May, 1918. H. G. WELLS. 

It is a dangerous thing to recommend specific books out of 
so large and various a literature as the " League of Nations " 
idea has already produced, but the reader who wishes to reach 
beyond the range of this book, or who does not like its tone and 
method, will probably find something to meet his needs and 
tastes better in Marburg's " League of Nations," a straightfor- 
ward account of the American side of the movement by the 
former United States Minister in Belgium, on the one hand, or 
in the concluding parts of Mr. Fayle's " Great Settlement " 
(1915), a frankly sceptical treatment from the British Im- 
perialist point of view, on the other. An illuminating dis- 
cussion, advocating peace treaties rather than a league is Sir 
Walter Phillimore's "Three Centuries of Treaties." Two 
excellent books from America, that chance to be on my table, 
are Mr. Goldsmith's "League to Enforce Peace" and "A 



X PREFACE 

World in Ferment" by President Nicholas Murray Butler. 
Mater's "Society des Nations" (Didier) is an able presen- 
tation of a French point of view. Brailsford's " A League 
of Nations" is already a classic of the movement in England, 
and a very full and thorough book; and Hobson's "Towards 
International Government " is a very sympathetic contribution 
from the English Liberal left, but the reader must under- 
stand that these two writers seem disposed to welcome a 
peace with an unrevolutionized Germany, an idea to which, 
in common with most British people, I am bitterly opposed. 
Walsh's " World Rebuilt " is a good exhortation, and Mugge's 
" Parliament of Man " is fresh and sane and able. The om- 
nivorous reader will find good sense and quaint English in 
Judge MejdelFs " Jus Oentium " published in English by 
Olsen's of Christiania. There is an active League of Nations 
Society in Dublin, as well as the London and Washington 
ones, publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. All 
these books and pamphlets I have named happen to lie upon 
my study table as I write, but T have made no systematic 
effort to get together literature upon the subject, and prob- 
ably there are just as many books as good of which I have 
never even heard. There must, I am sure, be statements of 
the League of Nations idea forthcoming from various religious 
standpoints, but I do not know any sufficiently well to recom- 
mend them. It is incredible that neither the Roman Catholic 
Church, the English Episcopal Church nor any Nonconformist 
body has made any effort as an organization to forward this 
essentially religious end of peace on earth. And also there 
must be German writings upon this same topic. I mention 
these diverse sources, not in order to present a bibliography, 
but because I should be sorry to have the reader think that 
this little book pretends to state the case rather than a case 
for the League of Nations. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Way to Concrete Kealization . . 1 

II The League Must be Representative . . 15 

III The Necessary Powers op the League . . 27 

IV The Labour View op Middle Africa . , 40 

V Getting the League Idea Clear in Rela- 
tion TO Imperialism 50 

VI The War Aims op the Western Allies . 79 

VII The Future op Monarchy 84 

VIII The Plain Necessity por a LExVgue ... 97 

IX Democracy 112 

X The Recent Struggle por Proportional 

Representation in Great Britain . . 131 

XI The Study and Propaganda op Democracy 148 



IN THE FOURTH YEAR 

THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

I 

THE WAY TO CONCEETE REALIZATION 

More and more frequently does one hear this 
phrase, The League of Nations, used to express 
the outline idea of the new world that will come 
out of the war. There can be no doubt that the 
phrase has taken hold of the imaginations of great 
multitudes of people: it is one of those creative 
phrases that may alter the whole destiny of man- 
kind. But as yet it is still a very vague phrase, 
a cloudy promise of peace. I make no apology, 
therefore, for casting my discussion of it in the 
most general terms. The idea is the idea of united 
human effort to put an end to wars; the first 
practical question, that must precede all others, 
is how far can we hope to get to a concrete reali- 
zation of that? 

But first let me note the fourth word in the 



2 THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 

second title of this book. The common talk is of 
a " League of Nations '' merely. I follow the man 
who is, more than any other man, the leader of 
English political thought throughout the world 
to-day, President Wilson, in inserting that signifi- 
cant adjective ^' Free." We western allies know 
to-day what is involved in making bargains with 
governments that do not stand for their peoples; 
we have had all our Russian deal, for example, 
repudiated and thrust back upon our hands; and 
it is clearly in his mind, as it must be in the minds 
of all reasonable men, that no mere "scrap of 
paper," with just a monarch's or a chancellor's 
endorsement, is a good enough earnest of fellowship 
in the league. It cannot be a diplomatists' league. 
The League of Nations, if it is to have any such 
effect as people seem to hope from it, must be, in 
the first place, " understanded of the people." It 
must be supported by sustained, deliberate explan- 
ation, and by teaching in school and church and 
press of the whole mass of all the peoples concerned. 
I underline the adjective " Free " here to set aside, 
once for all, any possible misconception that this 
modern idea of a League of Nations has any affinity 
to that Holy Alliance of the diplomatists, which 
set out to keep the peace of Europe so disastrously 
a century ago. 

Later I will discuss the powers of the League. 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 3 

But before I come to that I would like to say a 
little about the more general question of its nature 
and authority. What sort of gathering will em- 
body it? The suggestions made range from a mere 
advisory body, rather like the Hague convention, 
which will merely pronounce on the rights and 
wrongs of any international conflict, to the idea of 
a sort of Super-State, a Parliament of Mankind, 
a " Super National " Authority, practically taking 
over the sovereignty of the existing states and 
empires of the world. Most people's ideas of the 
League fall between these extremes. They w^ant 
the League to be something more than an ethical 
court, they want a League that will act, but on the 
other hand they shrink from any loss of " our 
independence." There seems to be a conflict here. 
There is a real need for many people to tidy up 
their ideas at this point. We cannot have our 
cake and eat it. If association is worth while, 
there must be some sacrifice of freedom to associa- 
tion. As a very distinguished colonial representa- 
tive said to me the other day : " Here we are 
talking of the freedom of small nations and the 
* self-determination ' of peoples, and at the same 
time of the Council of the League of Nations and 
all sorts of international controls. Which do we 
want? " 
The answer, I think, is " Both." It is a matter 



4 THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 

of more or less, of getting the best thing at the cost 
of the second-best. We may want to relax an old 
association in order to make a newer and wider 
one. It is quite understandable that peoples aware 
of a distinctive national character and involved in 
some big existing political complex, should wish to 
disentangle themselves from one group of associa- 
tions in order to enter more effectively into another, 
a greater, and more satisfactory one. The Finn or 
the Pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctant 
member of the synthesis of the Kussian empire, may 
well wish to end that attachment in order to become 
a free member of a world-wide brotherhood. The 
desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos. 
There is such a thing as untying your parcels in 
order to pack them better, and I do not see myself 
how we can possibly contemplate a great league 
of freedom and reason in the world without a 
considerable amount of such preliminary dissolu- 
tion. 

It happens, very fortunately for the world, that 
a century and a quarter ago thirteen various and 
very jealous states worked out the problem of a 
Union, and became — after an enormous, exhaust- 
ing wrangle — the United States of America. Now 
the way they solved their riddle was by delegating 
and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers 
and doing all that was possible to retain the resi- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 5 

duum. They remained essentially sovereign states. 
New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, for example, 
remained legally independent. The practical fu- 
sion of these peoples into one people outran the 
legal bargain. It was only after long years of dis- 
cussion that the point was conceded ; it was Indeed 
only after the Civil War that the implications were 
fully established, that there resided a sovereignty 
in the American people as a whole, as distinguished 
from the peoples of the several states. This is a 
precedent that every one who talks about the League 
of Nations should bear in mind. These states set 
up a congress and president in Washington with 
strictly delegated powers. That congress and 
president they delegated to look after certain 
common interests, to deal with interstate trade, to 
deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supreme 
court of law. Everything else — education, 
militia, powers of life and death — the states re- 
tained for themselves. To this day, for instance, 
the federal courts and the federal officials have 
no power to interfere to protect the lives or prop- 
erty of aliens in any part of the union outside the 
District of Columbia. The state governments still 
see to that. The federal government has the legal 
right perhaps to intervene, but it is still chary of 
such intervention. And these states of the Ameri- 
can Union were at the outset so independent-spir- 



6 THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 

ited that they would not even adopt a common 
name. To this day they have no common name. 
We have to call them Americans, which is a ridicu- 
lous name when we consider that Canada, Mexico, 
Peru, Brazil are all of them also in America. Or 
else we have to call them Virginians, Californians, 
New Englanders, and so forth. Their legal and 
nominal separateness weighs nothing against the 
real fusion that their great league has now made 
possible. 

Now, that clearly is a precedent of the utmost 
value in our schemes for this council of the League 
of Nations. We must begin by delegating, as the 
States began by delegating. It is a far cry to the 
time when we shall talk and think of the Sovereign 
People of the Earth. That council of the League 
of Nations will be a tie as strong, we hope, but 
certainly not so close and multiplex as the early 
tie of the States at Washington. It will begin 
by having certain delegated powers and no others. 
It will be an ^^ ad hoc '^ body. Later its powers 
may grow as mankind becomes accustomed to 
it. But at first it will have, directly or medi- 
ately, all the powers that seem necessary to restrain 
the world from war — and unless I know nothing of 
patriotic jealousies it will have not a scrap of 
power more. The danger is much more that its 
powers will be insufficient than that they will be ex- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 7 

cesslve. Of that later. What I want to discuss 
here now is the constitution of this delegated 
body. I want to discuss that first in order to set 
aside out of the discussion certain fantastic notions 
that will otherwise get very seriously in our way. 
Fantastic as they are, they have played a large part 
in reducing the Hague Tribunal to an ineffective 
squeak amidst the thunders of this war. 

A number of gentlemen scheming out world unity 
in studies have begun their proposals with the sim- 
ple suggestion that each sovereign power should 
send one member to the projected parliament of 
mankind. This has a pleasant democratic air; one 
sovereign state, one vote. Now let us run over a 
list of sovereign states and see to what this leads us. 
We find our list includes the British Empire, with 
a population of four hundred millions, of which 
probably half can read and write some language or 
other; Bogota with a population of a million, mostly 
poets ; Hayti with a population of a million and a 
third, almost entirely illiterate and liable at any 
time to further political disruption ; Andorra with 
a population of four or five thousand souls. The 
mere suggestion of equal representation between 
such " powers '■ is enough to make the British Em- 
pire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments. A 
certain concession to population, one must admit, 
was made by the theorists; a state of over three 



8 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

millions got, if I remember rightly, two delegates, 
and if over twenty, three, and some of the small 
states were given a kind of intermittent appearance, 
they only came every other time or something of 
that sort ; but at The Hague things still remained 
in such a posture that three or four minute and 
backward states could outvote the British Empire 
or the United States. Therein lies the clue to 
the insignificance of The Hague. Such projects as 
these are idle projects and we must put them out 
of our heads; they are against nature; the great 
nations will not suffer them for a moment. 

But when we dismiss this idea of representation 
by states, we are left with the problem of the pro- 
portion of representation and of relative weight in 
the Council of the League on our hands. It is the 
sort of problem that appeals terribly to the ingen- 
ious. We cannot solve it by making population a 
basis, because that will give a monstrous import- 
ance to the illiterate millions of India and China. 
Ingenious statistical schemes have been framed in 
which the number of university graduates and the 
steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own 
part I am not greatly impressed by statistical 
schemes. At the risk of seeming something of a 
Prussian, I would like to insist upon certain brute 
facts. The business of the- League of Nations is to 
keep the peace of the world and nothing else. No 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

power will ever dare to break the peace of the world 
if the powers that are capable of making war under 
modern conditions say " No^ And there are only 
four powers certainly capable at the present time 
of producing the men and materials needed for a 
modern war in sufficient abundance to go on fight- 
ing: Britain, France, Germany, and the United 
States. There are three others which are very 
doubtfully capable: Italy, Japan, and Austria. 
Russia I will mark — it is all that one can do with 
Russia just now — with a note of interrogation. 
Some day China may be war capable — I hope 
never, but it is a possibility. Personally I don't 
think that any other power on earth would have a 
ghost of a chance to resist the will — if it could be 
an honestly united will — of the first-named four. 
All the rest fight by the sanction of and by associa- 
tion with these leaders. They can only fight be- 
cause of the split will of the war-complete powers. 
Some are forced to fight by that very division. 

No one can vie with me in my appreciation of 
the civilization of Switzerland, Sweden, or Holland, 
but the plain fact of the case is that such powers 
are absolutely incapable of uttering an effective 
protest against war. Far less so are your Haytis 
and Liberias. The preservation of the world-peace 
rests with the great powers and with the great 
powers alone. If they have the will for peace, it is 



10 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

peace. If tliey have not, it is conflict. The four 
powers I have named can now, if they see fit, dic- 
tate the peace of the world for ever. 

Let us keep our grip on that. Peace is the 
business of the great powers primarily. Steel out- 
put, university graduates, and so forth may be con- 
venient secondary criteria, may be useful ways of 
measuring war efficiency, but the meat and sub- 
stance of the Council of the League of Nations must 
embody the wills of those leading peoples. They 
can give an enduring peace to the little nations and 
the whole of mankind. It can arrive in no other 
w^ay. So I take it that the Council of an ideal 
League of Nations must consist chiefly of the repre- 
sentatives of the great belligerent powers, and that 
the representatives of the minor allies and of the 
neutrals — essential though their presence will be 
— must not be allowed to swamp the voices of these 
larger masses of mankind. 

And this state of affairs may come about more 
easily than logical, statistical-minded people may 
be disposed to think. Our first impulse, when we 
discuss the League of Nations idea, is to think of 
some very elaborate and definite scheme of members 
on the model of existing legislative bodies, called 
together one hardly knows how, and sitting in a 
specially built League of Nations Congress House. 
All schemes are more methodical than reality. We 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 11 

think of somebody, learned and " expert," in spec- 
tacles, with a thin clear voice, reading over the 
" Projected Constitution of a League of Nations " 
to an attentive and respectful Peace Congress. 
But there is a more natural way to a league than 
that. Instead of being made like a machine, the 
League of Nations may come about like a marriage. 
The Peace Congress that must sooner or later meet 
may itself become, after a time, the Council of a 
League of Nations. The League of Nations may 
come upon us by degrees, almost imperceptibly. I 
am strongly obsessed by the idea that that Peace 
Congress will necessarily become — and that it is 
highly desirable that it should become — a most 
prolonged and persistent gathering. Why should 
it not become at length a permanent gathering, 
inviting representatives to aid its deliberations 
from the neutral states, and gradually adjusting 
itself to conditions of permanency? 

I can conceive no such Peace Congress as those 
that have settled up after other wars, settling up 
after this war. Not only has the war been enor- 
mously bigger than any other war, but it has struck 
deeper at the foundations of social and economic 
life. I doubt if we begin to realize how much of 
the old system is dead to day, how much has to be 
remade. Since the beginnings of history there has 
been a credible promise of gold payments under- 



12 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

neatli our tiiuiiicial arrangemeuts. It is now an 
iucrediblo promise. The value of a pound note 
waves about while yon look at it. What will hap- 
pen to it when peace comes no man can tell. Nor 
what will happen to the mark. The rouble has 
gone into the Abyss. Our giddy money specialists 
clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying 
down tlie steep. Mucli as we may liate the Ger- 
mans, some of ns will have to sit down with some 
of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the 
preservation of credit in money. And I presume 
that it is not proposed to end this war in a wild 
scramble of buyers for such food as remains in the 
world. There is a shortage now, a greater short- 
age ahead of the world, and there will be shortages 
of su])ply at the source and transport in food and 
all raw materials for some years to come. The 
Peace Congress will have to sit and organize a 
share-out and distribution and reorganization of 
these shattered supplies. It will have to Rhondda 
the nations. Probably, too, we shall have to deal 
collectively with a [>estilence before Ave are out of 
the mess. Then there are such little jobs as the 
reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia. There are 
considerable rectifications of boundaries to be made. 
There are fresh states to be created, in Poland and 
Armenia for example. About all these smaller 
states, new and old, that the peace must call into 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 13 

bein^, there must be a system of guarantees of 
the moBt difficult and complicated sort. 

I do not see the Press Congress getting through 
such matters as these in a session of weeks or 
months. The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest, 
that things were going to be done in the Versailles 
fashion by great moustached heroes frowning and 
drawing lines with a large black soldierly thumb- 
nail across maps, is — old-fashioned. They have 
made their eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, 
but they are still looking for some really responsi- 
ble government to keep them now that they are 
made. From first to last clearly the main peace 
negotiations are goiug to follow unprecedented 
courses. This preliminary discussion of war aims 
by means of great public speeches, that has been get- 
ting more and more explicit now for many months, 
is quite unprecedented. Api)arently all the broad 
preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the 
sight of all mankind before even an armistice oc- 
curs on the main, the western front. The German 
diplomatists hate this process. So do a lot of 
ours. So do some of the diplomatic Frenchmen. 
The German junkers are dodging and lying, they 
are fighting desperately to keep back everything 
they possibly can for the bargaining and bullying 
and table-banging of the council chamber, but that 
way there is no peace. And when at last Germany 



14 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the 
Peace Congress begins, it will almost certainly be 
as unprecedented as its prelude. Before it meets, 
the broad lines of the settlement will have been 
drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of 
mankind. 



II 

THE LEAGUE MUST BE REPRESENTATIVE 

A Peace Congress, growing permanent, then, may 
prove to be the most practical and convenient 
embodiment of this idea of a League of Nations 
that has taken possession of the imagination of the 
world. A most necessary preliminary to a Peace 
Congress, with such possibilities inherent in it, 
must obviously be the meeting and organization of a 
preliminary League of the Allied Nations. That 
point I would now enlarge. 

Half a world peace is better than none. There 
seems no reason whatever why the world should 
wait for the Central Powers before it begins this 
necessary work. Mr. McCurdy has been asking 
lately, " Why not the League of Nations nowf " 
That is a question a great number of people would 
like to echo very heartily. The nearer the Allies 
can come to a League of Free Nations before the 
Peace Congress the more prospect there is that that 
body will approximate in nature to a League of 
Nations for the whole world. 

In one most unexpected quarter the same idea 
has been endorsed. The King's Speech on the 

15 



16 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

prorogation of Parliament this February was one 
of the most remarkable royal utterances that have 
ever been made from the British throne. There 
was less of the old-fashioned King and more of the 
modern President about it than the most republican- 
minded of us could have anticipated. For the first 
time in a King's Speech we heard of the " democra- 
cies " of the world, and there was a clear claim that 
the Allies at present fighting the Central Powers 
did themselves constitute a League of Nations. 

But we must admit that at present they do so 
only in a very rhetorical sense. There is no real 
council of empowered representatives, and nothing 
in the nature of a united front has been prepared. 
Unless we provide beforehand for something more 
effective, Italy, France, the United States, Japan, 
and this country will send separate groups of repre- 
sentatives, with separate instructions, unequal 
status, and very probably conflicting views upon 
many subjects, to the ultimate peace discussions. 
It is quite conceivable — it is a very serious danger 
— that at this discussion skilful diplomacy on the 
part of the Central Powers may open a cleft among 
the Allies that has never appeared during the actual 
war. Have the British settled, for example, with 
Italy and France for the supply of metallurgical 
coal after the war? Those countries must have it 
somehow. Across the board Germany can make 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 17 

some tempting bids in that respect. Or take an- 
other question : Have the British arrived at com- 
mon views with France, Belgium, Portugal, and 
South Africa about the administration of Central 
Africa? Suppose Germany makes sudden propos- 
als affecting native labour that win over the Portu- 
guese and the Boers? There are a score of such 
points upon which we shall find the Allied repre- 
sentatives haggling with each other in the presence 
of the enemy if they have not been settled before- 
hand. 

It is the plainest common sense that we should 
be fixing up all such matters with our Allies now, 
and knitting together a common front for the final 
deal with German Imperialism. And these things 
are not to be done effectively and bindingly nowa- 
days by oflicial gentlemen in discreet undertones. 
They need to be done with the full knowledge and 
authority of the participating peoples. 

The Russian example has taught the world the 
instability of diplomatic bargains in a time of such 
fundamental issues as the present. There is little 
hope and little strength in hole-and-corner bargain- 
ings between the officials or politicians who happen 
to be at the head of this or that nation for the time 
being. Our Labour people will not stand this sort 
of thing and they will not be bound by it. There 
will be the plain danger of repudiation for all 



18 THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 

arrangements made in that fashion. A gathering 
of somebody or other approved by the British 
Foreign Office and of somebody or other approved 
by the French Foreign Office, of somebody with 
vague powers from America, and so on and so on, 
will be an entirely ineffective gathering. But that 
is the sort of gathering of the Allies we have been 
having hitherto, and that is the sort of gathering 
that is likely to continue unless there is a consider- 
able expression of opinion in favour of something 
more representative and responsible. 

Even our Foreign Office must be aware that in 
every country in the world there is now bitter 
suspicion of and keen hostility towards merely dip- 
lomatic representatives. One of the most signifi- 
cant features of the time is the evident desire of the 
Labour movement in every European country to 
take part in a collateral conference of Labour that 
shall meet when and where the Peace Congress 
does and deliberate and comment on its proceedings. 
For a year now the demand of the masses for such 
a Labour conference has been growing. It marks 
a distrust of officialdom whose intensity officialdom 
would do well to ponder. But it is the natural 
consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a cor- 
rective to, the aloofness and obscurity that have 
hitherto been so evil a characteristic of inter- 
national negotiations. I do not think Labour and 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 19 

intelligent people anywhere are going to be fobbed 
off with an old-fashioned diplomatic gathering as 
being that League of Free Nations they demand. 

On the other hand, I do not contemplate this 
bi-cameral conference with the diplomatists trying 
to best and humbug the Labour people as well as 
each other and the Labour people getting more and 
more irritated, suspicious, and extremist, with 
anything but dread. The Allied countries must go 
into the conference solid^ and they can only hope 
to do that by heeding and incorporating Labour 
ideas before they come to the conference. The only 
alternative that I can see to this unsatisfactory 
prospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side 
with a dissentient and probably revolutionary 
Labour and Socialist convention — both gatherings 
with unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one 
another and drifting to opposite extremes — is that 
the delegates the Allied Powers send to the Peace 
Conference (the same delegates which, if they are 
wise, they will have previously sent to a preliminary 
League of Allied Nations to discuss their common 
action at the Peace Congress) should be elected ad 
hoc upon democratic lines. 

I know that this will be a very shocking pro- 
posal to all our able specialists in foreign policy. 
They will talk at once about the " ignorance " of 
people like the Labour leaders and myself about 



20 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

such matters, and so on. What do we know of the 
treaty of so-and-so that was signed in the year 
seventeen something? — and so on. To which the 
answer is that we ought not to have been kept 
ignorant of these things. A day will come when 
the Foreign Offices of all countries will have to 
recognize that what the people do not know of 
international agreements " ain't facts." A secret 
treaty is only binding upon the persons in the 
secret. But what I, as a sample common person, 
am not ignorant of is this : that the business that 
goes on at the Peace Congress will either make or 
mar the lives of every one I care for in the world, 
and that somehow, by representative or what not, 
/ have to he there. The Peace Congress deals with 
the blood and happiness of my children and the 
future of my world. Speaking as one of the hun- 
dreds of millions of " rank outsiders " in public 
affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace treaty 
that may end this war unless I am honestly repre- 
sented at its making. I think everywhere there is 
a tendency in people to follow the Russian example 
to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which 
they have had no voice. 

I do not see that any genuine realization of the 
hopes with which all this talk about the League 
of Nations is charged can be possible, unless the 
two bodies which should naturally lead up to the 



THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 21 

League of Nations — that is to say, firstly, the 
Conference of the Allies, and then the Peace 
Congress — are elected bodies, speaking confidently 
for the whole mass of the peoples behind them. It 
may be a troublesome thing to elect them, but it 
will involve much more troublesome consequences 
if they are not elected. This, I think, is one of the 
considerations for which many people's minds are 
still unprepared. But unless we are to have over 
again after all this bloodshed and effort some such 
" Peace with Honour " foolery as we had performed 
by "Dizzy'- and Salisbury at that fatal Berlin 
Conference in which this present war was begotten, 
we must sit up to this novel proposal of electoral 
representation in the peace negotiations. Some- 
thing more than common sense binds our statesmen 
to this idea. They are morally pledged to it. 
President Wilson and our British and French 
spokesmen alike have said over and over again that 
they want to deal not with the Hohenzollerns but 
with the German people. In other words, we have 
demanded elected representatives from the German 
people with whom we may deal, and how can we 
make a demand of that sort unless we on our part 
are already prepared to send our own elected rep- 
resentatives to meet them? It is up to us to indi- 
cate by our own practice how we on our side, 
professing as we do to act for democracies, to make 



22 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

democracy safe on the earth, and so on, intend to 
meet this new occasion. 

Yet it has to be remarked that, so far, not one 
of the League of Nations projects I have seen have 
included any practicable |)roposals for the appoint- 
ment of delegates either to tliat ultimate body or to 
its two necessary predecessors, tlie Council of the 
Allies and the Peace Congress. It is evident that 
here, again, we are neglecting to get on with some- 
thing of very urgent importance. I will venture, 
therefore, to say a word or two here about the 
possible way in which a modern community may 
appoint its international representatives. 

And here, again, I turn from any European 
precedents to that political outcome of the British 
mind^ the Constitution of the United States. (Be- 
cause we must always remember that while our 
political institutions in Britain are a patch-up of 
feudalism, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian mon- 
archist traditions and urgent merely European 
necessities, a patch-up that has been made quasi- 
democratic in a series of afterthoughts, the 
American Constitution is a real, deliberate creation 
of the English-speaking intelligence.) The Presi- 
dent of the United States, then, we have to note, 
is elected in a most extraordinary way, and in a 
way that has now the justification of very great 
successes indeed. On several occasions the United 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 23 

States has achieved indisputable greatness in its 
Presidents, and very rarely has it failed to set up 
very leaderly and distinguished men. It is worth 
while, therefore, to inquire how this President is 
elected. He is neither elected directly by the people 
nor appointed by any legislative body. He is 
chosen by a special college elected by the people. 
This college exists to elect him; it meets, elects 
him, and disperses. (I will not here go into the 
preliminary complications that makes the election 
of a President follow upon a preliminary election 
of two Presidential Candidates. The point I am 
making here is that he is a specially selected man 
chosen ad hoc. ) Is there any reason why we should 
not adopt this method in this new necessity we are 
under of sending representatives, first, to the long 
overdue and necessary Allied Council, then to the 
Peace Congress, and then to the hoped-for Council 
of the League of Nations? 

I am anxious here only to start for discussion 
the idea of an electoral representation of the nations 
upon these three bodies that must in succession 
set themselves to define, organize, and maintain 
the peace of the world. I do not wish to compli- 
cate the question by any too explicit advocacy of 
methods of election or the like. In the United 
States this college which elects the President is 
elected on the same register of voters as that which 



24 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

elects the Senate and Congress, and at the same 
time. But I suppose if we are to give a popular 
mandate to the three or five or twelve or twenty 
(or whatever number it is) men to whom we are 
going to entrust our Empire's share in this great 
task of the peace negotiations, it will be more 
decisive of the will of the whole nation if the college 
that had to appoint them is elected at a special 
election. I suppose that the great British common- 
weals over-seas, at present not represented in Par- 
liament, would also and separately at the same time 
elect colleges to appoint their representatives. I 
suppose there would be at least one Indian repre- 
sentative elected, perhaps by some special electoral 
conference of Indian princes and leading men. The 
chief defect of the American Presidential election 
is that as the old single vote method of election is 
employed it has to be fought on purely party lines. 
He is the selectman of the Democratic half, or of the 
Republican half of the nation. He is not the select- 
man of the whole nation. It would give a far more 
representative character to the electoral college if it 
could be elected by fair modem methods, if for this 
particular purpose parliamentary constituencies 
could be grouped and the clean scientific method 
of proportional representation could be used. But 
I suppose the party politician in this, as in most 
of our affairs, must still have his pound of our flesh 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 25 

— and we must reckon with him later for the blood- 
shed. 

These are all, however, secondary considerations. 
The above paragraph is, so to si^eak, in the nature 
of a footnote. The fundamental matter, if we are 
to get towards any realization of this ideal of a 
world peace sustained by a League of Nations, is 
to get straight away to the conception of direct 
special electoral mandates in this matter. At 
present all the political luncheon and dinner par- 
ties in London are busy with smirking discussions 
of " Who is to go? " The titled ladies are particu- 
larly busy. They are talking about it as if we poor, 
ignorant, tax-paying, blood-paying common people 
did not exist. " L. G.," they say, will of course 
" insist on going," but there is much talk of the 
"Old Man." People are getting quite nice again 
about " the Old Man's feelings." It would be such 
a pretty thing to send him. But if " L. G." goes 
we want him to go with something more than a 
backing of intrigues and snatched authority. And 
I do not think the mass of people have any enthusi- 
asm for the Old Man. It is difficult again — by the 
dinner-party standards — to know how Lord Curzon 
can be restrained. But we common people do not 
care if he is restrained to the point of extinction. 
Probably there will be nobody who talks or under- 
stands Russian among the British representatives. 



26 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

But, of course, the British governing class has 
washed its hands of the Russians. They were al- 
ways very difficult, and now they are " impossible, 
my dear, perfectly impossible.'^ 

No! That sort of thing will not do now. This 
Peace Congress is too big a job for party politicians 
and society and county families. The bulk of 
British opinion cannot go on being represented for 
ever by President Wilson. We cannot always look 
to the Americans to express our ideas and do our 
work for democracy. The foolery of the Berlin 
Treaty must not be repeated. We cannot have an- 
other popular Prime Minister come triumphing 
back to England with a gross of pink spectacles — 
through which we may survey the prospect of the 
next great war. The League of Free Nations means 
something very big and solid ; it is not a rhetorical 
phrase to be used to pacify a restless, distressed, 
and anxious public, and to be sneered out of exist- 
ence when that use is past. When the popular 
mind now demands a League of Free Nations it de- 
mands a reality. The only way to that reality is 
through the direct x)articipation of the nation as a 
whole in the settlement, and that is possible only 
through the direct election for this particular issue 
of representative and responsible men. 



Ill 

THE NECESSARY POWERS OF THE LEAGUE 

If this phrase, " the League of Free Nations," is 
to signify anything more than a rhetorical flourish, 
then certain consequences follow that have to be 
faced now. No man can join a partnership and 
remain an absolutely free man. You cannot bind 
yourself to do this and not to do that and to consult 
and act with your associates in certain eventuali- 
ties without a loss of your sovereign freedom. Peo- 
ple in this country and in France do not seem to 
be sitting up manfully to these necessary proposi- 
tions. 

If this League of Free Nations is really to be an 
effectual thing for the preservation of the peace of 
the world it must possess power and exercise power, 
powers must be delegated to it. Otherwise it will 
only help, with all other half-hearted good resolu- 
tions, to pave the road of mankind to hell. Nothing 
in all the world so strengthens evil as the half- 
hearted attempts of good to make good. 

It scarcely needs repeating here — it has been so 
generally said — that no League of Free Nations 
can hope to keep the peace unless every member of 

27 



28 THE LEAGUE OP FKEE NATIONS 

it is indeed a free member, represented by duly 
elected persons. Nobody, of course, asks to " dic- 
tate the internal government " of any country to 
that country. If Germans, for instance, like to 
wallow in absolutism after the war they can do so. 
But if they or any other peoples wish to take part 
in a permanent League of Free Nations it is only 
reasonable to insist that so far as their representa- 
tives on the council go they must be duly elected 
under conditions that are by the standards of the 
general league satisfactorily democratic. That 
seems to be only the common sense of the matter. 
Every court is a potential conspiracy against 
freedom, and the League cannot tolerate merely 
court appointments. If courts are to exist any- 
where in the new world of the future, they will be 
wise to stand aloof from international meddling. 
Of course if a people, after due provision for 
electoral representation, choose to elect dynastic 
candidates, that is an altogether different matter. 

And now let us consider what are the powers 
that must be delegated to this proposed council of 
a League of Free Nations, if that is really effec- 
tually to prevent war and to organize and establish 
and make peace permanent in the world. 

Firstly, then, it must be able to adjudicate upon 
all international disputes whatever. Its first func- 
tion must clearly be that. Before a war can break 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 29 

out there must be the possibility of a world decision 
upon its rights and wrongs. The League, therefore, 
will haye as its primary function to maintain a 
Supreme Court, whose decisions will be final, before 
which every sovereign power may appear as plain- 
tiff against any other sovereign power or group of 
powers. The plea, I take it, will always be in the 
form that the defendant power or powers is engaged 
in proceedings " calculated to lead to a breach of 
the peace," and calling upon the League for an 
injunction against such proceedings. I suppose 
the proceedings that can be brought into court in 
this way fall under such headings as these that 
follow: restraint of trade by injurious tariffs or 
suchlike differentiations, or by interference with 
through traffic, improper treatment of the subjects 
or their property (here I put a query) of the plain- 
tiff nation in the defendant state, aggressive mili- 
tary or naval preparation, disorder spreading over 
the frontier, trespass (as, for instance, by airships), 
propaganda of disorder, espionage, permitting the 
organization of injurious activities, such as raids 
or piracy. Clearly all such actions must come 
within the purview of any world-supreme court 
organized to prevent war. But in addition there 
is a more doubtful and delicate class of case, arising 
out of the discontent of patches of one race or 
religion in the dominions of another. How far may 



30 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

the supreme court of the world attend to grievances 
between subject and sovereign? 

Such cases are highly probable, and no large, 
vague propositions about the " self-determination " 
of peoples can meet all the cases. In Macedonia, 
for instance, there is a jumble of Albanian, Serbian, 
Bulgarian, Greek and Roumanian villages always 
jostling one another and maintaining an intense 
irritation between the kindred nations close at 
hand. And quite a large number of areas and 
cities in the world, it has to be remembered, are 
not homogeneous at all. Will the great nations of 
the world have the self-abnegation to permit a 
scattered subject i)opulation to appeal against the 
treatment of its ruling power to the Supreme 
Court? This is a much more serious interference 
with sovereignty than intervention in an external 
quarrel. Could a Greek village in Bulgarian Mace- 
donia plead in the Supreme Court? Could the 
Armenians in Constantinople, or the Jews in 
Roumania, or the Poles in West Prussia, or the 
negroes in Georgia, or the Indians in the Transvaal 
make such an appeal? Could any Indian popula- 
tion in India appeal? Personally I should like to 
see the power of the Supreme Court extend as far 
as this. I do not see how we can possibly prevent 
a kindred nation pleading for the scattered people 
of its own race and culture, or any nation pre- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 31 

sen ting a case on behalf of some otherwise unrepre- 
sented people- — the United Slates, for example, 
presenting a case on behalf of the Armenians. But 
I doubt if many people have made up their minds 
yet to see the i^owers of the Sui)reme Court of the 
League of Nations go so far as this. I doubt if, to 
begin with, it will be possible to provide for these 
cases. I would like to see it done, but I doubt if 
the majority of the sovereign peoples concerned 
will reconcile their national pride with the idea, at 
least so far as their own subject populations go. 

Here, you see, I do no more than ask a question. 
It is a difficult one, and it has to be answered before 
we can clear the way to the League of Free Nations. 

But the Supreme Court, whether it is to have 
the wider or the narrower scope here suggested, 
would be merely the central function of the League 
of Free Nations. Behind the decisions of the 
Supreme Court must lie power. And here come 
fresh difficulties for patriotic digestions. The 
armies and navies of the world must be at the 
disposal of the League of Free Nations, and that 
opens up a new large area of delegated authority. 
The first impulse of any power disposed to chal- 
lenge the decisions of the Supreme Court will be, of 
course, to arm ; and it is difficult to imagine how the 
League of Free Nations can exerci&e any practical 
authority unless it has power to restrain such 



32 THE LEAGUE OP FKEE NATION fe 

armament. The League of Free Nations must, in 
fact, if it is to be a working reality, have power to 
define and limit the military and naval and aerial 
equipment of every country in the world. This 
means something more than a restriction of state 
forces. It must have power and freedom to inves- 
tigate the military and naval and aerial establish- 
ments of all its constituent powers. It must also 
have effective control over every armament indus- 
try. And armament industries are not always easy 
to define. Are aeroplanes, for example, armament? 
Its powers, I suggest, must extend even to a re- 
straint upon the belligerent propaganda which is 
the natural advertisement campaign of every arma- 
ment industry. It must have the right, for exam- 
ple, to raise the question of the proprietorship of 
newspapers by armament interests. Disarmament 
is, in fact, a necessary factor of any League of 
Free Nations, and vou cannot have disarmament 
unless you are prepared to see the powers of the 
council of the League extend thus far. The very 
existence of the League presupposes that it and it 
alone is to have and to exercise military force. 
Any other belligerency or preparation or incitement 
to belligerency becomes rebellion, and any other 
arming a threat of rebellion, in a world League of 
Free Nations. 

But here, again, has the general mind yet thought 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 33 

out all that is involved in this proposition? In all 
the great belligerent countries the armament in- 
dustries are now huge interests with enormous 
powers. Krupp's business alone is as powerful a 
thing in Germany as the Crown. In every coun- 
try a heavily subsidized '^ patriotic '• press will fight 
desperately against giving powers so extensive and 
thorough as those here suggested to an international 
body. So long, of course, as the League of Free 
Nations remains a project in the air, without body 
or parts, such a press will sneer at it gently as 
" Utopian," and even patronize it kindly. But so 
soon as the League takes on the shape its general 
proposition makes logically necessary, the arma- 
ment interest will take fright. Then it is we shall 
hear the drum patriotic loud in defence of the 
human blood trade. Are w^e to hand over these 
most intimate affairs of ours to " a lot of foreign- 
ers "? Among these " foreigners " who will be ap- 
pealed to to terrify the patriotic souls of the British 
will be the " Americans.'- Are we men of English 
blood and tradition to see our affairs controlled by 
such " foreigners " as Wilson, Lincoln, Webster and 
Washington? Perish the thought I When they 
might be controlled by Disraelis, Wettins, Mount- 
Battens and what not! And so on and so on. 
Krupp's agents and the agents of the kindred firms 
in Great Britain and France will also be very busy 



34 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

with the national pride of France. In Germany 
they have already created a colossal suspicion of 
England. 

Here is a giant in the path. . . . 

But let us remember that it is only necessary to 
defeat the propaganda of this vile and dangerous 
industry in four great countries. And for the com- 
mon citizen^ touched on the tenderest part of his 
patriotic susceptibilities, there are certain irrefuta- 
ble arguments. Whether the ways of the world in 
the years to come are to be the paths of peace or 
the paths of war is not going to alter this essential 
fact, that the great educated world communities, 
with a social and industrial organization on a war- 
capable scale, are going to dominate human affairs. 
Whether they spend their ijower in killing or in 
educating and creating, France, Germany, however 
much we may resent it, the two great English- 
speaking communities, Italy, Japan, China, and 
X>resently perhaps a renascent Russia, are jointly 
going to control the destinies of mankind. Whether 
that joint control comes through arms or through 
the law is a secondary consideration. To refuse 
to bring our affairs into a common council does not 
make us independent of foreigners. It makes us 
more dependent upon them, as a very little con- 
sideration will show. 

I am suggesting here that the League of Free 



THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 35 

Nations shall practically control the army, navy, 
air forces, and armament industry of every nation 
in the world. What is the alternative to that? 
To do as we please? No, the alternative is that 
any malignant country will he free to force upon 
all the rest just the maximum amount of armament 
it chooses to adopt. Since 1871 France, we say, 
has been free in military matters. What has been 
the value of that freedom? The truth is, she has 
been the bond-slave of Germany, bound to watch 
Germany as a slave watches a master, bound to 
launch submarine for submarine and cast gun for 
gun, to sweep all her youth into her army, to subdue 
her trade, her literature, her education, her whole 
life to the necessity of preparations imposed upon 
her by her drill -master over the Rhine. And 
Michael, too, has been a slave to his imperial master 
for the self-same reason, for the reason that Ger- 
many and France were both so proudly sovereign 
and independent. Both countries have been slaves 
to Kruppism and Zabernism — hecause they were 
sovereign and free! So it will always be. So long 
as patriotic cant can keep the common man jealous 
of international controls over his belligerent possi- 
bilities, so long will he be the helpless slave of the 
foreign threat, and " Peace ■' remain a mere name 
for the resting phase between wars. 

But power over the military resources of the 



36 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

world is by no means the limit of the necessary 
powers of an effective League of Free Nations. 
There are still more indigestible implications in the 
idea, and, since they have got to be digested sooner 
or later if civilization is not to collapse, there is no 
reason why we should not begin to bite upon them 
now. I was much interested to read the British 
press upon the alleged proposal of the German 
Chancellor that we should give up (presumably to 
Germany) Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and suchlike 
key possessions. It seemed to excite several of our 
politicians extremely. I read over the German 
Chancellor's speech very carefully, so far as it was 
available, and it is clear that he did not propose 
anything of the sort. Wilfully or blindly our press 
and our demagogues screamed over a false issue. 
The Chancellor was defending the idea of the Ger- 
mans remaining in Belgium and Lorraine because 
of the strategic and economic importance of those 
regions to Germany, and he was arguing that be- 
fore we English got into such a feverish state of 
indignation about that, we should first ask our- 
selves what we were doing in Gibraltar, etc., etc. 
That is a different thing altogether. And it is an 
argument that is not to be disposed of by misrepre- 
sentation. The British have to think hard over 
this quite legitimate German tii quoqiie. It is no 
good getting into a patriotic bad temper and ref us- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 37 

ing to answer that question. We British people 
are so persuaded of the j)urity and unselfishness 
with which we discharge our imperial responsibili- 
ties, we have been so trained in imperial self-satis- 
faction, we know so certainly that all our subject 
nations call us blessed, that it is a little difficult 
for us to see just how the fact that we are, for 
example, so deeply rooted in Egypt looks to an out- 
side intelligence. Of course the German imperialist 
idea is a wicked and aggressive idea, as Lord Robert 
Cecil has explained; they want to set up all over 
the earth coaling stations and strategic points, on 
the pattern of ours. Well, they argue, we are only 
trying to do what you British have done. If we 
are not to do so — because it is aggression and 
so on and so on — is not the time ripe for you to 
make some concessions to the public opinion of the 
world? That is the German argument. Either, 
they say, tolerate this idea of a Germany with ad- 
vantageous posts and possessions round and about 
the earth, or reconsider your own position. 

Well, at the risk of rousing much patriotic wrath, 
I must admit that I think we have to reconsider our 
position. Our argument is that in India, Egypt, 
Africa and elsewhere, we stand for order and civili- 
zation, we are the trustees of freedom, the agents 
of knowledge and efficiency. On the whole the 
record of British rule is a pretty respectable one; 



38 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

I am not ashamed of our record. Nevertheless the 
case is altering. 

It is quite justifiable for us British, no doubt, 
if we do really play the part of honest trustees, to 
remain in Egypt and in India under existing condi- 
tions; it is even possible for us to glance at the 
helplessness of Arabia, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, 
as yet incapable of self government, helpless as 
new-born infants. But our case, our only justifi- 
able case, is that we are trustees because there is no 
better trustee possible. And the creation of a coun- 
cil of a League of Free Nations would be like the 
creation of a Public Trustee for the world. The 
creation of a League of Free Nations must neces- 
sarily be the creation of an authority that may 
legitimately call existing empires to give an account 
of their stewardship. For an unchecked fragment- 
ary control of tropical and chaotic regions, it sub- 
stitutes the possibility of a general authority. And 
this must necessarily alter the problems not only 
of the politically immature nations and the control 
of the tropics, but also of the regulation of the sea 
ways, the regulation of the coming air routes, and 
the distribution of staple products in the world. I 
will not go in detail over the items of this list, be- 
cause the reader can fill in the essentials of the 
argument from what has gone before. I want 
simply to suggest how widely this project of a 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 39 

League of Free Nations swings when once you have 
let it swing freely in your mind! And if you do 
not let it swing freely in your mind, it remains 
nothing — a sentimental gesture. 

The plain truth is that the League of Free 
Nations, if it is to be a reality, if it is to effect a 
real pacification of the world, must do no less than 
supersede Empire; it must end not only this new 
German imperialism, which is struggling so sav- 
agely and powerfully to possess the earth, but it 
must also wind up British imperialism and French 
imperialism, which do now so largely and inag- 
gressively possess it. And, moreover, this idea 
queries the adjective of Belgian, Portuguese, 
French, and British Central Africa alike, just as 
emphatically as it queries " German." Still more 
effectually does the League forbid those creations 
of the futurist imagination, the imperialism of 
Italy and Greece, which make such threatening ges- 
tures at the world of our children. Are these 
incompatibilities understood? Until peoy)le have 
faced the clear antagonism that exists between im- 
perialism and internationalism, they have not begun 
to suspect the real significance of this project of the 
League of Free Nations. They have not begun to 
realize that peace also has its price. 



IV 

THE LABOUR VIEW OF MIDDLE AFRICA 

I WAS recently privileged to hear the views of one 
of those titled and influential ladies -^ v^dth a gen- 
eral education at about the fifth standard level, 
plus a little French, German, Italian, and music — 
who do so much to make our England what it is 
at the present time, upon the Labour idea of an 
international control of " tropical '^ Africa. She 
was loud and derisive about the " ignorance '■ of 
Labour. '^ What can they know about foreign 
politics?'' she said, with gestures to indicate her 
conception of them. 

I w^as moved to ask her w^hat she would do about 
Africa. '^ Leave it to Lord Robert ! ■' she said, lean- 
ing forward impressively. ^'^ Leave it to the people 
who know/' 

Unhappily I share the evident opinion of Labour 
that we are not blessed with any profoundly wise 
class of people w^ho have definite knowledge and 
clear intentions about Africa, that these '^people 
who know " are mostly a pretentious bluff, and so, 
in spite of a very earnest desire to take refuge in 

40 



THE LEAGUE OP FKEE NATIONS 41 

my " ignorance " from the burthen of thinking 
about African problems, I find myself obliged like 
most other people to do so. In the interests of our 
country, our children, and the world, we common 
persons have to have opinions about these matters. 
A muddle-up in Africa this year may kill your son 
and mine in the course of the next decade. I know 
this is not a claim to be interested in things Afri- 
can, such as the promoter of a tropical railway or 
an oil speculator has ; still it is a claim. And for 
the life of me I cannot see what is wrong about 
the Labour proposals, or what alternative exists 
that can give even a hope of peace in and about 
Africa. 

The gist of the Labour proposal is an inter- 
national control of Africa between the Zambesi and 
the Sahara. This has been received with loud pro- 
tests by men whose work one is obliged to respect, 
by Sir Harry Johnston, for example, and Sir Alfred 
Sharpe, and with something approaching a shriek 
of hostility by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But I 
think these gentlemen have not perhaps given the 
Labour proposal quite as much attention as they 
have spent upon the details of African conditions. 
I think they have jumped to conclusions at the mere 
sound of the word " international." There have 
been some gross failures in the past to set up inter- 
national administrations in Africa and the Near 



42 THE LEAGUE OP FEEE NATIONS 

East. And these gentlemen think at once of some 
new Congo administration and of nondescript 
police forces commanded by cosmopolitan adven- 
turers. ( See Joseph Conrad's " Outpost of Civili- 
zation.") They think of internationalism with 
greedy Great Powers in the background outside 
the internationalized area, intriguing to create 
disorder and mischief with ideas of an ultimate an- 
nexation. But I doubt if such nightmares do any 
sort of justice to the Labour intention. 

And the essential thing I would like to point 
out to these authorities upon African questions 
is that not one of them even hints at any other 
formula which covers the broad essentials of the 
African riddle. 

What are these broad essentials? What are the 
ends that must be achieved if Africa is not to con- 
tinue a festering sore in the body of mankind? 

The first most obvious danger of Africa is the 
militarization of the black. General Smuts has 
pointed this out plainly. The negro makes a good 
soldier ; he is hardy, he stands the sea, and he stands 
cold. ( There was a negro in the little party which 
reached the North Pole.) It is absolutely essential 
to the peace of the world that there should be no 
arming of the negroes beyond the minimum neces- 
sary for the policing of Africa. But how is this to 
be watched and prevented if there is no overriding 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 43 

body representing civilization to say " Stop -' to the 
beginnings of any such militarization? I do not 
see how Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Alfred Sharpe, and 
the other authorities can object to at least an inter- 
national African " Disarmament Commission '' to 
watch, warn, and protest. At least they must con- 
cede that. 

But in practice this involves something else. A 
practical consequence of this disarmament idea 
must be an effective control of the importation of 
arms into the " tutelage " areas of Africa. That 
rat at the dykes of civilization, that ultimate ex- 
pression of political scoundrelism, the Gun-Runner, 
has to be kept under and stamped out in Africa as 
everywhere. A Disarmament Commission that has 
no forces available to prevent the arms trade will 
be just another Hague Convention, just another 
vague, well-intentioned, futile gesture. 

And closely connected w4th this function of con- 
trolling the arms trade is another great necessity 
of Africa under '^ tutelage," and that is the neces- 
sity of a common collective agreement not to de- 
moralize the native population. That demoraliza- 
tion, physical and moral, has already gone far. 
The whole negro population of Africa is now rotten 
with diseases introduced by Arabs and Europeans 
during the last century, and such African states- 
men as Sir Harry Johnston are eloquent upon the 



44 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

necessity of saving the blacks — and the baser 
whites — from the effects of trade gin and similar 
alluring articles of commerce. Moreover, from 
Africa there is always something new in the way 
of tropical diseases, and presently Africa, if we let 
it continue to fester as it festers now, may produce 
an epidemic that will stand exportation to a tem- 
perate climate. A bacterium that may kill you or 
me in some novel and disgusting way may even now 
be developing in some Congo muck-heap. So here 
is the need for another Commission to look after 
the Health of Africa. That, too, should be of au- 
thority over all the area of " tutelage " Africa. It 
is no good stamping out infectious disease in Nyasa- 
land while it is being bred in Portuguese East 
Africa. And if there is a Disarmament Commis- 
sion already controlling the importation of arms, 
why should not that body also control at the same 
time the importation of trade gin and similar deli- 
cacies, and direct quarantine and such-like health 
regulations? 

But there is another question in Africa upon 
which our "ignorant'' Labour class is far better 
informed than our dear old eighteenth-century 
upper class which still squats so firmly in our For- 
eign and Colonial Offices, and that is the question 
of forced labour. We cannot tolerate any possi- 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 45 

bilities of the enslavement of black Africa. Long 
ago the United States found out the impossibility 
of having slave labour working in the same system 
with white. To cure that anomaly cost the United 
States a long and bloody war. The slave-owner, 
the exploiter of the black, becomes a threat and a 
nuisance to any white democracy. He brings back 
his loot to corrupt Press and life at home. What 
happened in America in the midst of the last cen- 
tury between Federals and Confederates must not 
happen again on a larger scale between white 
Europe and middle Africa. Slavery in Africa, open 
or disguised, whether enforced by the lash or 
brought about by iniquitous land-stealing, strikes 
at the home and freedom of every European worker 
— ayid Labour Jcnows tJiis. 

But how are we to prevent the enslavement and 
economic exploitation of the blacks if we have no 
general Avatcher of African conditions? We want 
a common law for Africa, a general Declaration of 
Eights, of certain elementary rights, and we want 
a common authority to which the black man and 
the native tribe may appeal for justice. What is 
the good of trying to elevate the population of 
Uganda and to give it a free and hopeful life if 
some other population close at hand is competing 
against the Baganda worker under lash and tax? 



46 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

So here is a third aspect of our international Com- 
mission, as a native protectorate and court of 
appeal ! 

There is still a fourth aspect of the African ques- 
tion in which every mother's son in Europe is 
closely interested, and that is the trade question. 
Africa is the great source of many of the most 
necessary raw materials upon which our modern 
comforts and conveniences depend; more par- 
1 ticularly is it the source of cheap fat in the form 
^ of palm oil. One of the most powerful levers in 
the hands of the Allied democracies at the present 
time in their struggle against the imperial brigands 
of Potsdam is the complete control we have now 
obtained over these essential supplies. We can, if 
we choose, cut off Germany altogether from these 
vital economic necessities, if she does not consent 
to abandon militant imperialism for some more civ- 
ilized form of government. We hope that this war 
will end in that renunciation, and that Germany 
will re-enter the community of nations. But 
whether that is so or not, whether Germany is or 
is not to be one of the interested parties in the 
i African splution, the fact remains that it is impos- 
I sible to contemplate a continuing struggle for the 
I African raw material supply between the interested 
Powers. Sooner or later that means a renewal of 
war. International trade rivalry is, indeed, only 



THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 47 

war — smouldering. We need, and Labour de- 
mands, a fair, frank treatment of African trade, 
and that can only be done by some overriding 
regulative power, a Commission whicb, so far as 
I can see, might also be the same Commission as 
that we have already hypothesized as being neces- 
sary to control the Customs in order to prevent 
gun-running and the gin trade. That Commission 
might very conveniently have a voice in the admin- 
istration of the great waterways of Africa (which 
often run through the possessions of several Pow- 
ers) and in the regulation of the big railway lines 
and air routes that will speedily follow the con- 
clusion of peace. 

Now this I take it is the gist of the Labour pro- 
posal. This — and no more than this — is what is 
intended by the " international control of tropical 
Africa.-' I do not read that phrase as abrogating 
existing sovereignties in Africa. What is contem- 
plated is a delegation of authority. Every one 
should know, though unhappily the badness of our 
history teaching makes it doubtful if every one does 
know, that the Federal Government of the United 
States of America did not begin as a sovereign Gov- 
ernment, and has now only a very questionable 
sovereignty. Each State was sovereign, and each 
State delegated certain powers to Washington. 
That was the initial idea of the union. Only 



48 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

later did the idea of a people of the States as a 
whole emerge. In the same waj I understand the 
Labour proposal as meaning that we should dele- 
gate to an African Commission the middle African 
Customs, the regulation of inter- State trade, inter- 
State railways and waterways, quarantine and 
{ health generally, and the establishment of a Su- 
preme Court for middle African affairs. One or 
two minor matters, such as the preservation of 
rare animals, might very well fall under the same 
authority. 

Upon that Commission the interested nations, 
that is to say — putting them in alphabetical order 
— the Africander, the Briton, the Belgian, the 
Egyptian, the Frenchman, the Italian, the Indian, 
the Portuguese — might all be represented in pro- 
portion to their interest. Whether the German 
would come in is really a question for the German 
to consider; he can come in as a good European, 
he cannot come in as an imperialist brigand. 
Whether, too, any other nations can claim to have 
an interest in African affairs, whether the Commis- 
sion would not be better appointed by a League 
of Free Nations than directly by the interested 
Governments, and a number of other such ques- 
tions, need not be considered here. Here we are 
discussing only the main idea of the Labour pro- 
posal. 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 49 

Now beneath the supervision and restraint of 
such a delegated Commission I do not see why 
the existing administrations of tutelage Africa 
should not continue. I do not believe that the 
Labour proposal contemplates any humiliating 
cession of European sovereignty. Under that in- 
ternational Commission the French flag may still 
wave in Senegal and the British over the pro- 
tected State of Uganda. Given a new spirit in 
Germany I do not see why the German flag should 
not presently be restored in German East Africa. 
But over all, standing for righteousness, patience, 
fair play for the black, and the common welfare 
of mankind would wave a new flag, the Sun of 
Africa, representing the Central African Commis- 
sion of the League of Free Nations. 

That is my vision of the Labour project. It is 
something very different, I know^, from the night- 
mare of an international police of cosmopolitan 
scoundrels in nondescript uniforms, hastening to 
loot and ravish his dear Uganda and his beloved 
Nigeria, w^hich distresses the crumpled pillow of 
Sir Harry Johnston. But if it is not the solution, 
then it is up to him and his fellow authorities to 
tell us what is the solution of the African riddle. 



GETTING THE LEAGUE IDEA CLEAR IN 
RELATION TO IMPERIALISM 



It is idle to pretend that even at the present time 
the idea of the League of Free Nations has secure 
possession of the British mind. There is quite 
naturally a sustained opposition to it in all the 
fastnesses of aggressive imperialism. Such papers 
as the Times and the Morning Post remain hostile 
and obstructive to the expression of international 
ideas. Most of our elder statesmen seem to have 
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing during the 
years of wildest change the world has ever known. 
But in the general mind of the British peoples the 
movement of opinion from a narrow imperialism 
towards internationalism has been wide and swift. 
And it continues steadily. One can trace week 
by week and almost day by day the Americaniza- 
tion of the British conception of the Allied War 
Aims. It may be interesting to reproduce here 
three communications upon this question made at 
different times by the present writer to the press. 

50 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 51 

The circumstances of their publication are signifi- 
cant. The first is in substance identical with a 
letter which was sent to the Times late in Maj, 
1917, and rejected as being altogether too revolu- 
tionary. For nowadaj^s the correspondence in the 
Times has ceased to be an impartial expression of 
public opinion. The correspondence of the Times 
is now apparently selected and edited in accordance 
with the views ux>on public policy held by the acting 
editor for the day. More and more has that paper 
become the organ of a sort of Oxford Imperialism, 
three or four years behind the times and very ripe 
and " expert." The letter is here given as it was 
finally printed in the issue of the Daih/ Chronicle 
for June 4th, 1917, under the heading, " Wanted a 
Statement of Imperial Policy.'' 

Sir, — The time seems to have come for much 
clearer statements of outlook and intention from 
this country than it has hitherto been possible to 
make. The entry of America into the war and the 
banishment of autocracy and aggressive diplomacy 
from Russia have enormously cleared the air, and 
the recent great speech of General Smuts at the 
Savoy Hotel is probably only the first of a series 
of experiments in statement. It is desirable alike 
to clear our own heads, to unify our efforts, and to 
give the nations of the world some assurance and 



52 THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 

standard for our national conduct in the future, 
that we should now define the Idea of our Empire 
and its relation to the world outlook much more 
clearly than has ever hitherto been done. Never 
before in the history of mankind has opinion 
counted for so much and persons and organizations 
for so little as in this war. Never before has the 
need for clear ideas, widely understood and con- 
sistently sustained, been so commandingly vital. 

What do we mean by our Empire, and what 
is its relation to that universal desire of mankind, 
the permanent rule of peace and justice in the 
world? The whole world will be the better for a 
very plain answer to that question. 

Is it not time for us British not merely to admit 
to ourselves, but to assure the world that our 
Empire as it exists to-day is a provisional thing, 
that in scarcely any part of the world do we regard 
it as more than an emergency arrangement, as a 
necessary association that must give place ulti- 
mately to the higher synthesis of a world league, 
that here we hold as trustees and there on account 
of strategic considerations that may presently 
disappear, and that though we will not contemplate 
the replacement of our flag anywhere by the flag 
of any other competing nation, though we do hope 
to hold together with our kin and with those who 
increasingly share our tradition and our language, 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 53 

nevertheless we are prepared to welcome great 
renunciations of our present ascendency and 
privileges in the interests of mankind as a whole. 
We need to make the world understand that we 
do not put our nation nor our Empire before the 
commonwealth of man. Unless presently we are 
to follow Germany along the tragic path her 
national vanity and her world ambitions have 
made for her, that is what we have to make clear 
now. It is not only our duty to mankind, it is 
also the sane course for our own preservation. 

Is it not the plain lesson of this stupendous 
and disastrous war that there is no way to secure 
civilization from destruction except by an impartial 
control and protection in the interests of the 
whole human race, a control representing the best 
intelligence of mankind, of these main causes of 
war. 

(1) The politically undeveloped tropics; 

(2) Shipping and international trade; and 

(3) Small nationalities and all regions in a 
state of political impotence or confusion? 

It is our case against the Germans that in all 
these three cases they have subordinated every 
consideration of justice and the general human 
welfare to a monstrous national egotism. That 
argument has a double edge. At present there is a 
vigorous campaign in America, Russia, the neutral 



54 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

countries generally, to represent British patriotism 
as equally egotistic, and our purpose in tliis war 
as a mere parallel to the German purpose. In the 
same manner, though perhaps with less persistency, 
France and Italy are also caricatured. We are 
supposed to be grabbing at Mesopotamia and Pales- 
tine, France at Syria; Italy is represented as pur- 
suing a Machiavellian policy towards the unfortu- 
nate Greek republicans, with her eyes on the Greek 
islands and Greece in Asia. Is it not time that 
these base imputations were repudiated clearly and 
conclusively by our Alliance? And is it not time 
that we began to discuss in much more frank and 
definite terms than has hitherto been done, the 
nature of the international arrangement that will 
be needed to secure the safety of such liberated 
populations as those of Palestine, of the Arab 
regions of the old Turkish empire, of Armenia, of 
reunited Poland, and the like? 

I do not mean here mere diplomatic discussions 
and " understandings.-' I mean such full and plain 
statements as Avill be spread through the whole 
world and grasped and assimilated by ordinary 
people everywhere, statements by which we, as a 
people, will be prepared to stand or fall. 

Almost as urgent is the need for some definite 
statement about Africa. General Smuts has 
warned not only the Empire, but the whole world 



TifE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONH 55 

of the gigantic threat to civilization that lies in 
thfi present division of Africa between various 
keenly competitive European Powers, any one of 
which will be free to misuse the great natural re- 
sources at its disposal and to arm millions of black 
soldiers for aggression. A mere elimination of 
Oerinany from Africa will not solve that difficulty. 
What we have to eliminate is not this nation or 
that, but the system of national shoving and elbow- 
ing, the treatment of Africa as the board for a game 
of beggar-my-neighbour-and-damn-the-niggers, in 
which a few syndicates, masquerading as natioDal 
interests, snatch a profit to the infinite loss of all 
mankind. We want a lowering of Ijarriers and a 
unification of interests, we want an international 
control of these disputed regions, to override nation- 
alist exploitation. The whole world wants it. It 
is a chastened and reasonable world we live in to- 
day, and the time for white reason and the wide 
treatment of these problems is now. 

Finally, the time is drawing near when the 
Egyptian and the nations of India will ask us, 
'^ Are things going on for ever here as they go on 
now, or are we to look for the time when we, too, 
like the Africander, the Canadian and the Austral- 
ian, will be your confessed and equal partners? " 
Would it not be wise to answer that question in 
the affirmative before the voice in which it is asked 



50 THE LKAOUK OF FKKF NATIONS 

^•r(>ws tliifk witli niiufiM*? In l^'uypf, for oxumplo, 
wo aiv oiduM* rohbtM's vory like — oxi'oj)! for a cer- 
tain ditVoronco in (oiii'h — the (Normans in Holgium, 
or wo aro honourabU* trnstoos. Tl is onr claim and 
prido to bo hononrablt* trnstoos. Nothinj^ so bo- 
eonios a (rnstoo as a cboorfnl oponnoss of disposi- 
tion. Oroat l^ritain has to table her world policy. 
It is a thing* overdue. No doubt we have already 
a literature of liberal imperialism and a consider- 
able accnmnlation of declarations by this statesman 
or that. r>ut what is needed is a formulation much 
nu>rt^ representative, otVudal and permanent than 
(iiat, jsonicthini;- that can be juit beside President 
Wilson's clear renderin«j^ o\' (he American idea. 
We want all our peoples lo understand, and we 
want all nuinkiud io understand that onr Empire 
is not a net abont the world in which the progress 
of numkind is ontauiiled, but a self-conscious 
political system workinu* side by side with the 
other democracies of the carih, preparing the way 
for, and prepared at last to sacriiice and emerge 
itself in, the world confederation of free and eqnal 
peoples. 

§ 2 
This letter was presently followed np by an 
article in the Dailtj Sews, entitled '' A Reasonable 
Man's Peace." This article provoked a consider- 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 57 

able controversy in the imperialist press, and it was 
reprinted as a pamphlet by a Free Trade organiza- 
tion, which distributed over 200,000 copies. It is 
jjarticularly interesting to note, in view of what 
follows it, that it was attacked with great virulence 
in the Evening "News^ the little fierce mud-throwinf.^ 
brother of the Daily Mail. 

The international situation at the present time 
is beyond question the most wonderful tliat the 
world has ever seen. There is not a country in 
the world in which the great majority of sensible 
people are not passionately desirous of peace, of 
an enduring peace, and — the war goes on. The 
conditions of peace can now be stated in general 
terms that are as acceptable to a reasonable man 
in Berlin as they are to a reasonable man in Paris 
or London or Petrograd or Constantinople. There 
are to be no conquests, no domination of recal- 
citrant populations, no bitter insistence upon 
vindictive penalties, and there must be something 
in the nature of a world-wide League of Nations 
to keep the peace securely in future, to " make the 
world safe for democracy/' and maintain inter- 
national justice. To that the general mind of the 
world has come to-day. 

Why, then, does the waste and killing go on? 
Why is not the Peace Conference sitting now? 



58 TFTE LKAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

^laiiifosfly becaiiso a small minority of people 
ill positions of peculiar advantai»e, in positions of 
trust and authority, and particularly the German 
reactionaries, prevent or delay its assembling. 

The answer which seems to suftice in all the 
Allied countries is that the German Imperial 
GoTernment — that the Gernum Imperial Govern- 
ment alone — stands in (he way, that its tradition 
is incurably a tradition of conquest and aggression, 
that until German militarism is overthrown, etc. 
Few people in the Allied countries will dispute that 
that is broadly true. But is it the whole and 
complete truth? Is there nothing more to be done 
on our side? Let us put a question that goes to 
the very heart of the problem. Why does the great 
mass of the German people still cling to its incur- 
ably belligerent Government? 

The answer to that question is not overwhelm- 
ingly ditlicult. The German people sticks to its 
militarist imperialism as Mazeppa stuck to his 
horse; because it is bound to it, and the wolves 
pursue. The attentive student of the home and 
foreign propaganda literature of the German Gov- 
ernment will realize that the ease made by German 
imperialism, the main argument by which it sticks 
to power, is this, that the Allied Governments are 
also imperialist, that they also aim at conquest and 
aggression, that for Germany the choice is world 



TITE [J:A0UE of free NATIONH 59 

ompiro or downfall and utter ruin. ThiH is the 
argument that holdH the German i>eo[)le KtifTly 
united. For rno8t men in moHt countries it would 
be a convincing argument, strong enough to over- 
ride considerations of right and wrong. I find that 
I myself am of this way of thinking, that whether 
England has done right or wrong in the past — and 
I have sometimes criticized my count ry very bitterly 
— I will not endure the prospect of seeing her at 
the foot of some victorious foreign nation. Neither 
will any German who matters. Very few people 
would respect a German who did. 

But the case for the Allies is that this great 
argument by which, and by which alone, the Ger- 
man Imperial Government keeps its grip upon the 
(ierman people at the present time, and keeps them 
facing their enemies, is untrue. The Allies declare 
that they do not want to destroy the German people, 
they do not want to cripple the German people; 
they want merely to see certain gaf)irjg wounds 
inflicted by Germany repaired, and beyond that 
reasonable requirement ihoy want nothing but to 
be assured, completely assured, absolutely assured, 
against any further aggressions on the part of 
Germany. 

Is that true? Our leaders say so, and we believe 
them. We would not support them if we did not. 
And if it is true, have the statesmen of the Allies 



60 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

made it as transparently and convincingly clear to 
the German people as possible? That is one of the 
supreme questions of the present time. We cannot 
too earnestly examine it. Because in the answer 
to it lies the reason why so many men were killed 
yesterday on the eastern and western front, so many 
ships sunk, so much property destroyed, so much 
human energy wasted for ever upon mere destruc- 
tion, and why to-morrow and the next day and 
the day after — through many months yet, perhaps 
— the same killing and destroying must still go on. 
In many respects this w^ar has been an amazing 
display of human inadaptability. The military 
history of the war has still to be written, the grim 
story of machinery misunderstood, improvements 
resisted, antiquated methods persisted in; but the 
broad facts are already before the public mind. 
After three years of war the air offensive, the only 
possible decisive blow, is still merely talked of. 
Not once nor twice only have the Western Allies 
had victory wdthin their grasp — and failed to grip 
it. The British cavalry generals wasted the great 
invention of the tanks as a careless child breaks a 
toy. At least equally remarkable is the dragging 
inadaptability of European statecraft. Every- 
w^here the failure of ministers and statesmen to rise 
to the urgent definite necessities of the present time 
is glaringly conspicuous. They seem to be incapa- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 61 

ble even of thinking how the war may be brought 
to an end. They seem incapable of that plain 
speaking to the world audience which alone can 
bring about a peace. They keep on with the tricks 
and feints of a departed age. Both on the side of 
the Allies and on the side of the Germans the decla- 
rations of public policy remain childishly vague 
and disingenuous, childishly " diplomatic." They 
chalfer like happy imbeciles while civilization 
bleeds to death. It was perhaps to be expected. 
Few, if any, men of over five-and-forty completely 
readjust themselves to changed conditions, however 
novel and challenging the changes may be, and 
nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are 
elderly men trained in a tradition of diplomatic 
ineffectiveness, and now overworked and over- 
strained to a pitch of complete inelasticity. They 
go on as if it were still 1913. Could anything be 
more palpably shifty and unsatisfactory, more sen- 
ile, more feebly artful, than the recent utterances 
of the German Chancellor? And, on our own 
side — 

Let us examine the three leading points about 
this peace business in which this jaded statecraft 
is most apparent. 

Let the reader ask himself the following ques- 
tions : — 

Does he know what the Allies mean to do with 



62 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

the problem of Central Africa? It is the clear 
common sense of the African situation that while 
these precious regions of raw material remain 
divided up between a number of competitive 
European imperialisms, each resolutely set upon 
the exploitation of its " possessions '^ to its own 
advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there 
can be no permanent peace in the world. There 
can be permanent peace in the world only when 
tropical and sub-tropical Africa constitute a field 
free to the commercial enterprise of every one irre- 
spective of nationality, when this is no longer an 
area of competition between nations. This is possi- 
ble only under some supreme international control. 
It requires no special knowledge nor wisdom to see 
that. A schoolboy can see it. Any one but a 
statesman absolutely flaccid with overstrain can see 
that. However difficult it may prove to work out 
in detail, such an international control must there- 
fore be worked out. The manifest solution of the 
problem of the German colonies in Africa is neither 
to return them to her nor deprive her of them, but 
to give her a share in the pooled general control of 
mid-Africa. In that way she can be deprived of all 
power for political mischief in Africa without hu- 
miliation or economic injury. In that way, too, we 
can head off — and in no other way can we head off 
— the power for evil, the power of developing quar- 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 63 

rels inherent in " imperialisms '• other than Ger- 
man. \ 

But has the reader any assurance that this sane 
solution of the African problem has the support 
of the Allied Governments? At best he has only 
a vague persuasion. And consider how the matter 
looks " over there." The German Government 
assures the German people that the Allies intend 
to cut off Germany from the African supply of raw 
material. That would mean the practical destruc- 
tion of German economic life. It is something far 
more vital to the mass of Germans than any ques- 
tion of Belgium or Alsace-Lorraine. It is, there- 
fore, one of the ideas most potent in nerving the 
overstrained German people to continue their fight. 
Why are we, and why are the German people, not 
given some definite assurance in this matter? 
Given reparation in Europe, is Germany to be al- 
lowed a fair share in the control and trade of a 
pooled and neutralized Central Africa? Sooner or 
later we must come to some such arrangement. 
Why not state it plainly now? 

A second question is equally essential to any 
really permanent settlement, and it is one upon 
which these eloquent but unsatisfactory mouth- 
pieces of ours turn their backs with an equal reso- 
lution, and that is the fate of the Ottoman Empire. 
What in plain English are we up to there? What- 



64 THE LEAOITR OF FKEE Nx\T10N!j^ 

ever liappoiis, tlint lliiiii[>tv Duiupty cannot be 
pnt back as it was before the war. The idea of the 
Oernian imperialist, the idea of our own little band 
of noisy but inthiential imperialist vulgarians, is 
evidently a game of grab, a perilous cutting up of 
these areas into jostling protectorates aiui spheres 
of intluence, from which either the Oennans or the 
Allies (according to the side jo\i are on) are to be 
viciously shut out. On such a basis this war is a 
war to the death. Keither Germanv, France, 
Britain, Italy, nor Kussia can live prosperously if 
its trade and enterprise is shut out from this car- 
dinally important area. There is, therefore, no 
alternative, if we are to have a satisfactory per- 
nument pacification of the world, but local self- 
development in these regions under honestly con- 
ceived internatioiuil control of police and transit 
and trade. Let it be gnuited that that will be a 
difficult control to organize. None the less it has 
to be attempted. It has to be attempted because 
they^e is no other way of peaxw. But once that con- 
ception has been clearly formulated, a second great 
motive why Germany should continue lighting will 
have 2:one. 

The third great issue about which there is noth- 
ing but fog and uncertainty is the so-called ** War 
After the War," the idea of a permanent economic 
alliance to prevent the economic recuperation of 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 65 

Germany. Upon that idea German imperialism, in 
its frantic effort to keep its tormented people fight- 
ing, naturally puts the utmost stress. The threat 
of War after the War robs the reasonable German 
of his last inducement to turn on his Government 
and insist upon peace. Shut out from all trade, 
unable to buy food;, deprived of raw material, peace 
would be as bad for Germany as war. He will 
argue naturally enough and reasonably enough 
that he may as well die fighting as starve. This 
is a far more vital issue to him than the Belgian 
issue or Poland or Alsace-Lorraine. Our states- 
men Avaste their breath and slight our intelligence 
when these foreground questions are thrust in front 
of the really fundamental matters. But as the 
mass of sensible people in every country concerned, 
in Germany just as much as in France or Great 
Britain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade is 
good for every one except a few rich adventurers, 
and restricted trade destroys limitless wealth and 
welfare for mankind to make a few private for- 
tunes or secure an advantage for some imperialist 
clique. We want an end to thip economic strategy, 
we want an end to this plotting of Governmental 
cliques against the general welfare. In such 
offences Germany has been the chief of sinners, but 
which among the belligerent nations can throw the 
first stone? Here again the way to the world's 



66 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

peace, the only waj to enduring peace, lies through 
internationalism, through an international survey 
of commercial treaties, through an international 
control of inter-State shipping and transport rates. 
Unless the Allied statesmen fail to understand the 
implications of their own general professions they 
mean that. But why do they not say it plainly? 
Why do they not shout it so compactly and loudly 
that all Germany will hear and understand? Why 
do they justify imperialism to Germany? Why do 
they maintain a threatening ambiguity towards 
Germany on all these matters? 

By doing so they leave Germany no choice but 
a war of desperation. They underline and endorse 
the claim of German imperialism that this is a war 
for bare existence. They unify the German people. 
They prolong the war. 

§ 3 
Some weeks later I was able, at the invitation 
of the editor to carry the controversy against im- 
perialism into the Daily Mail, which has hitherto 
counted as a strictly imperialist paper. The arti- 
cle that follows was published in the Daily Mail 
under the heading, " Are we Sticking to the Point? 
A Discussion of War Aims.'' 

Has this War-Aims controversy really got down 
to essentials? Is the purpose of this world conflict 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 67 

from first to last too complicated for brevity, or 
can we boil it down into a statement compact 
enough for a newspaper article? 

And if we can, why is there all this volumi- 
nous, uneasy, unquenchable disputation about War 
Aims? 

As to the first question, I would say that the 
gist of the dispute between the Central Powers and 
the world can be written easily without undue 
cramping in an ordinary handwriting upon a post- 
card. It is the second question that needs answer- 
ing. And the reason why the second question has 
to be asked and answered is this, that several of the 
Allies, and particularly we British, are not being 
perfectly plain and simple-minded in our answer 
to the first, that there is a division among us and 
in our minds, and that our division is making us 
ambiguous in our behaviour, that it is weakening 
and dividing our action and strengthening and con- 
solidating the enemy, and that unless we can drag 
this slurred-over division of aim and spirit into 
the light of day and settle it now, we are likely to 
remain double-minded to the end of the war, to split 
our strength while the war continues and to come 
out of the settlement at the end with nothing nearly 
worth the strain and sacrifice it has cost us. 

And first, let us deal with that postcard and 
say what is the essential aim of the war, the aim 



68 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

to which all other aims are subsidiary. It is, we 
have heard repeated again and again by every 
statesman of importance in every Allied country, 
to defeat and destroy military imperialism, to make 
the world safe for ever against any such deliberate 
aggression as Germany prepared for forty years 
and brought to a climax when she crossed the 
Belgian frontier in 1914. We want to make any- 
thing of that kind on the part of Germany or of 
any other Power henceforth impossible in this 
world. That is our great aim. Whatever other ob- 
jects may be sought in this war no responsible 
statesman dare claim them as anything but subsi- 
diary to that ; one can say, in fact, this is our sole 
aim, our other aims being but parts of it. Better 
that millions should die now, we declare, than that 
hundreds of millions still unborn should go on liv- 
ing, generation after generation, under the black 
tyranny of this imperialist threat. 

There is our common agreement. So far, at any 
rate, we are united. The question I would put 
to the reader is this: Are we all logically, sin- 
cerely, and fully carrying out the plain implications 
of this War Aim? Or are we to any extent mud- 
dling about with it in such a way as to confuse and 
disorganize our Allies, weaken our internal will, 
and strengthen the enemy? 

Now the plain meaning of this supreme declared 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 69 

War Aim is that we are asking Germany to alter 
her ways. We are asking Germany to become a 
different Germany. Either Germany has to be 
utterly smashed up and destroyed or else Germany 
has to cease to be an aggressive military imperial- 
ism. The former alternative is dismissed by most 
responsible statesmen. They declare that they do 
not wish to destroy the German people or the Ger- 
man nationality or the civilized life of Germany. 
I will not enlarge here upon the tedium and diffi- 
culties such an undertaking would present. I will 
dismiss it as being not only impossible, but also as 
an insanely wicked project. The second alterna- 
tive, therefore, remains as our War Aim. I do not 
see how the sloppiest reasoner can evade that. As 
we do not want to kill Germany we must w^ant to 
change Germany. If we do not want to wipe Ger- 
many off the face of the earth, then we want Ger- 
many to become the prospective and trustworthy 
friend of her fellow nations. And if words have 
any meaning at all, that is saying that we are fight- 
ing to bring about a Kevolution in Germany. We 
want Germany to become a democratically con- 
trolled State, such as is the United States to-day, 
with open methods and pacific intentions, instead 
of remaining a clenched fist. If we can bring that 
about we have achieved our War Aim; if we can- 
not, then this struggle has been for us only such 



70 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

loss and failure as humanity has never known be- 
fore. 

But do we, as a nation, stick closely to this clear 
and necessary, this only possible, meaning of our 
declared War Aim? That great, clear-minded 
leader among the Allies, that Englishman who more 
than any other single man speaks for the whole 
English-speaking and Western-thinking commu- 
nity. President Wilson, has said definitely that this 
is his meaning. America, with him as her spokes- 
man, is under no delusion; she is fighting con- 
sciously for a German Revolution as the essential 
War Aim. We in Europe do not seem to be so 
lucid. I think myself we have been, and are still, 
fatally and disastrously not lucid. It is high time, 
and over, that we cleared our minds and got down 
to the essentials of the war. We have muddled 
about in blood and dirt and secondary issues long 
enough. 

We in Britain are not clear-minded, I would 
point out, because we are double-minded. No good 
end is served by trying to ignore in the fancied in- 
terests of " unity '' a division of spirit and inten- 
tion that trips us up at every step. We are, we 
declare, fighting for a complete change in inter- 
national methods, and we are bound to stick to the 
logical consequences of that. We have placed our- 
selves on the side of democratic revolution against 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 71 

autocratic monarchy, and we cannot afford to go 
on shillyshallying with that choice. We cannot 
in these days of black or white play the part of 
lukewarm friends to freedom. I will not remind 
the reader here of the horrible vacillations and in- 
consistencies of policy in Greece that have pro- 
longed the war and cost us wealth and lives be- 
yond measure, but President Wilson himself has 
reminded us pungently enough and sufficiently 
enough of the follies and disingenuousness of our 
early treatment of the Russian Revolution. What 
I want to point out here is the supreme importance 
of a clear lead in this matter now in order that we 
should state our War Aims effectively. 

In every war there must be two sets of War 
Aims kept in mind; we ought to know what we 
mean to do in the event of victory so complete that 
we can dictate what terms we choose, and we ought 
to know what, in the event of a not altogether con- 
clusive tussle, are the minimum terms that we 
should consider justified us in a discontinuance of 
the tussle. Now, unless our leading statesmen are 
humbugs and unless we are prepared to quarrel 
wdth America in the interests of the monarchist 
institutions of Europe, we should, in the event of 
an overwhelming victory, destroy both the Hohen- 
zollern and Hapsburg Imperialisms, and that 
means, if it means anything at all and is not mere 



72 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

lying rhetoric, that we should insist upon Germany 
becoming free and democratic, that is to say, in 
effect if not in form republican, and upon a series 
of national republics, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo- 
Croatian, Bulgarian, and the like, in Eastern Eu- 
rope grouped together if possible into congenial 
groups — crowned republics it might be in some 
cases, in the case of the Serb for example, but in no 
case too much crowned — that we should join with 
this renascent Germany and with these thus liberal- 
ized Powers and with our Allies and with the neu- 
trals in one great League of Free Nations, trading 
freely with one another, guaranteeing each other 
freedom, and maintaining a world-wide peace and 
disarmament and a new reign of law for mankind. 
If that is not what we are out for, then I do not 
understand what we are out for ; there is dishonesty 
and trickery and diplomacy and foolery in the 
struggle, and I am no longer whole-hearted for such 
a half-hearted war. If after a complete victory we 
are to bolster up the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, 
and their relations, set up a constellation of more 
cheating little subordinate kings, and reinstate that 
system of diplomacies and secret treaties and secret 
understandings, that endless drama of international 
threatening and plotting, that never-ending arming, 
that has led us after a hundred years of waste and 
muddle to the supreme tragedy of this war, then the 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 73 

world is not good enough for me and I shall be glad 
to close my eyes upon it. I am not alone in these 
sentiments. I believe that in writing thus I am 
writing the opinion of the great mass of reasonable 
British, French, Italian, Russian, and American 
men. I believe, too, that this is the desire also of 
great numbers of Germans, and that they would, if 
they could believe us, gladly set aside their present 
rulers to achieve this plain common good for man- 
kind. 

But, the reader will say, what evidence is there 
of any republican feeling in Germany? That is 
always the objection made to any reasonable dis- 
cussion of the war — and as most of us are denied 
access to German papers, it is difficult to produce 
quotations; and even when one does, there are 
plenty of fools to suggest and believe that the en- 
tire German Press is an elaborate camouflage. Yet 
in the German Press there is far more criticism of 
militant imperialism than those w^ho have no access 
to it can imagine. There is far franker criticism 
of militarism in Germany than there is of reaction- 
ary Toryism in this country, and it is more free to 
speak its mind. 

That, however, is a question by the way. It is 
not the main thing that I have to say here. What 
I have to say here is that in Great Britain — I will 
not discuss the affairs of any of our Allies — there 



74 TUK LEAiUUO OV FKEE NATIONS 

are groups aiul ila^sos of pooplo, not nuiuorous, not 
ivprt^soutiUivo. bui plaood in hii^li ami inthioiUial 
positions anil t-apablo of fivo and pnblii' iittoranco, 
who aro secretly and bitterly hostile to this ijjreat 
War Aim, Nyhieh insi)ires all the Allied ptH>i)les. 
These ]>eople :\vc permitted to deny our peculiar 
censorship does uoi hamper them — loudly and 
publicly tliat \ye are tiuhtiuix for democracy and 
world freedom; "Tosh," they say to our dead in 
tiie trenches. '* voii died for a mistake"; they jeer 
at this 'n\c:\ o( a Leatiue of Nations makint:: an end 
to >yar, an idea that has inspired countless braye 
lads to face death and such pains antl hardships 
as outdo eyen deaih iiself; (hey perplex and irri- 
tate our Allies by proi)oundiniX schemes for some 
pivcious economic U^aune of the Hritish I'hnpire — 
that is to treat all •* foiviiiiiers " with a conunon 
base seKishness and stupid hatred — ami they in- 
triiiue with the most reactionary fori'cs in Ixussia. 
Tlu^se British reactionaries openly, and with per- 
fect impunity, represent onr war as a thing* as 
mean and shameful as (lerniany's attack on Bel- 
gium, and they do it because generosity and justice 
in the world is as terrible to them as dawn is to the 
creatures of the night. Our Tories blundered into 
iliis great war, not seeing whither it would take 
them. In [^articular it is maTiifest now by a hun- 
dred signs that they dread the fall of monarchy in 



^i'lii: LioAoi;!': of ntioi-: nationb 75 

(ji'Vinatiy iui<\ AuHtria. i''ar rather would t,h(>y 
friakr-. t,h': rnoHl abjc/:!, Hiirrr-jjdf^rH to Uj<: K<).iy.<:f t.hari 
rjr-,jj,l wifij ;i v(-n'A.r.<'.<']\\. i:f;fHj(>lic:afj O'tnuriuy. TIj*: 
n^<!('ijt UtW.f.v of Lord Luundown^i, 'Jrj^irjj.^ a p^a^-^^ 
with (U'Sffiiifi irnjK-rJaliHrrjj was f^ut, a iccA'-.r \v<)\u 
the par-ifint sid^: of thin irjonl un 1-^rjf.HlHh, and un 
happily moHL influf-ntial, HftcUon of our f^uhli^: lif^:. 
Lord Lan::<Jown(^'K l^Jt.^.r wan t.hf, Jf:U/tr of a I'Kir 
who fVtain [(ivoluiion rnoro. than natjona] dinhorjour. 

J>ijt it i.H \.\\(t trijcuW^nf. win;.^ of tjjj>, ;:arrjr; anti- 
(J(irrjOf:ratj>! rnov^trrjftrjt. that, is far rnont af:t,ive. 
Whiht our Hon.s siiff^-f and dJf- for th^tir conjforiH 
and con f:^. it., th^H^i pcoph: Hch^rn^. t.o pr^A^jjt. any 
communication h^J^wrtr-.n Ihr- J{(',publJ<:an and So- 
claliHt, oja;:;/-.;; in Gcj-many and t.hrt Allied popula- 
tion. At any cost this class r^f j>ampcrcd and prir- 
iIo^'c(J traitorH intend to have j:>cacf: while the Kaincr 
i8 Htill on his throufi. \^ not they face a new world 
— in which their pari will be small indeed. And 
wilh the utmost inj^cnuity they maintain a danger- 
ous vagueriCHH about the Allied peace to-ms, with 
the Hole object of prevcntinfj a revolutionary move- 
ment in (lerrnany. 

Let mf; put it to tlie reader exactly why our 
failure to sjjy plainly and exactly and conclusively 
what we mean to (Jo al^out a Hcore of points, and 
j)articularly about German economic life after the 
war, [»aralyHeK the {penitents and fHend« and help- 



76 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

ers that we coiiUl now tiiid iu Germany. Let me 
ask the reader to suppose himself a German iu Ger- 
many at the present time. Of course if he was, he 
is sure that he would hate the Kaiser as the source 
of this atrocious war, he would be bitterly asliamed 
of the Belgian iniquity, of the submarine murders, 
and a score of such stains upon his national honour; 
and he would want to alter his national system and 
make peace. Hundreds of thousands of Germans 
are in that uu^od now. But as most of us have 
had to learn, a man may be bitterly ashamed of 
this or that incident in his country's history — what 
Englishman, for instance, can be proud of Glencoe? 
— he may disbelieve in half its institutions and still 
love his country far too much to suffer the thought 
of its destruction. I prefer to see my country 
right, but if it comes to the pinch and my country 
sins I will light to save her from the destruction her 
sins may have brought upon her. That is the nat- 
ural Avay of man. 

But sui)pose a German wished to try to start a 
revolutionary movement in Germany at the present 
time, have we given him any reason at all for sup- 
posing that a Germany liberated and democratized, 
but, of course, divided and weakened as she would 
be bound to be in the process, would get better 
terms from the Allies than a Germany still facing 
them, militant, imperialist, and wicked? He woidd 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONH 77 

hiiV(t no rc/dHoii for belifiviug anythiug of the Kort. 
If w(3 Allies are lioueHt, then if a revolution Btar-ted 
in Oer-njany to-day we should if anything lower the 
price of peace to Oermany. But these people who 
pretend to lead us will state nothing of the sor-t. 
For them a revolution in Germany would be the 
signal for putting up the price of peace. At any 
risk they are resolved that that German revolution 
shall not happen. Your sane, good German, let 
me assert, is up against that as hard as if he was a 
wicked one. And so, poor devil, he has to put his 
revolutionary ideas away, they are hopeless ideas 
for him because of the power of the British reac- 
tionary, they are hopeless because of the line we 
as a nation take in this matter, and he has to go on 
lighting for his masters. 

A plain statement of our war aims that did no 
more than set out honestly and convincingly the 
terms the Allies would make with a democratic 
republican Germany — republican 1 say, because 
where a scrap of Ilohenzollern is left to-day there 
will be a fresh militarism to-morrow — would abso- 
lutely revolutionize the internal psychology of 
Germany. We should no longer face a solid people. 
We should have replaced the false issue of Germany 
and Britain fighting for the hegemony of Europe, 
the lie upon which the German Government has 
always traded, and in which our extreme Tory 



78 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

Press lias always supported the German Govern- 
ment, bj the true issue, which his freedom versus 
imperialism, the League of Nations versus that 
net of diplomatic roguery and of aristocratic, pluto- 
cratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which 
dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed 
and loss. 



VI 

THE WAR AIMS OF THE WESTERN 
ALLIES 

Here, quite compactly, is a plain statement of the 
essential cause and process of the war to which I 
would like to see the Allied Foreign Offices sub- 
scribe, and which I would like to have placed 
plainly before the German mind. It embodies 
much that has been learnt and thought out since 
this war began, and I think it is much truer and 
more fundamental than that mere raging against 
German " militarism " upon which our politicians 
and press still so largely subsist. . . . 

The enormous development of war methods and 
war material within the last fifty years has made 
war so horrible and destructive that it is impos- 
sible to contemplate a future for mankind from 
which it has not been eliminated; the increased 
facilities of railway, steamship, automobile travel 
and air navigation have brought mankind so close 
together that ordinary human life is no longer safe 
anywhere in the boundaries of the little states in 
which it was once secure. In some fashion it is 
now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity to 

79 



80 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

establish a world peace and save the future of man- 
kind. 

In one or other of two ways only is that unifica- 
tion possible. Either men may set up a common 
league to keep the peace of the earth, or one state 
must ultimately become so great and powerful as 
to repeat for all the world what Eome did for Eu- 
rope two thousand years ago. Either we must have 
human unity by a league of existing states or by 
an Imperial Conquest. The former is now the 
declared Aim of our country and its Allies ; the lat- 
ter is manifestly the ambition of the present rulers 
of Germany. Whatever the complications may 
have been in the earlier stages of the war, due to 
treaties that are now dead letters and agreements 
that are extinct, the essential issue now before 
every man in the world is this: Is the unity of 
mankind to be the unity of a common freedom, in 
which every race and nationality may participate 
with complete self-respect, playing its part, accord- 
ing to its character, in one great world community, 
or is it to be reached — and it can only be so reached 
through many generations of bloodshed and strug- 
gle still, even if it can be ever reached in this way 
at all — through conquest and a German hege- 
mony? 

While the rulers of Germany to-day are more 
openly aggressive and imperialist than they were 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 81 

in August, 1914, the Allies arrayed against them 
have made great progress in clearing up and real- 
izing the instincts and ideals which brought them 
originally into the struggle. The German govern- 
ment oifers the world to-day a warring future in 
which Germany alone is to be secure and powerful 
and proud. Mankind will not endure that. The 
Allies offer the world more and more definitely the 
scheme of an organized League of Free Nations, a 
rule of law and justice about the earth. To fight 
for that and for no other conceivable end, the 
United States of America, with the full sympathy 
and co-operation of every state in the western hemi- 
sphere, has entered the w^ar. The British Empire 
in the midst of the stress of the great war has set 
up in Dublin a Convention of Irishmen of all opin- 
ions with the fullest powers of deciding upon the 
future of their country. If Ireland were not di- 
vided against herself she could be free and equal 
with England to-morrow. It is the open intention 
of Great Britain to develop representative govern- 
ment, where it has not hitherto existed, in India 
and Egypt, to go on steadfastly increasing the 
share of the natives of these countries in the gov- 
ernment of their own lands, until they too become 
free and equal members of the world league. 
Neither France, nor Italy, nor Britain, nor Amer- 
ica has ever tampered with the shipping of other 



82 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

countries except in time of war, and the trade of 
the British Empire has been impartially open to 
all the world. The extra-national " possessions/' 
the so-called " subject nations '' in the Empires of 
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, are in fact pos- 
sessions held in trust against the day when the 
League of Free Nations will inherit for mankind. 
Is it to be union by conquest or is it to be union 
by league? For any sort of man except the Ger- 
man the question is, will you be a free citizen or 
will you be an underling to the German imperial- 
ism? For the German now the question is a far 
graver and more tragic one. For him it is this : — 
" You belong to a people not now increasing very 
rapidly, a numerous people, but not so numerous 
as some of the great peoples of the world, a people 
very highly trained, very well drilled and well 
armed, perhaps as well trained and drilled and 
equipped as ever it will be. The collapse of Rus- 
sian imperialism has made you safe if now you can 
get peace, and you can get a peace now that will 
neither destroy you nor humiliate you nor open 
up the prospect of fresh wars. The Allies offer you 
such a peace. To accept it, we must warn you 
plainly, means refusing to go on with the manifest 
intentions of your present rulers, which are to 
launch you and your children and your children's 
children upon a career of struggle for war pre- 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 83 

dominance, which may no doubt inflict untold de- 
privations and miseries upon the rest of mankind 
but whose end in the long run for Germany and 
things German can be only Judgment and Death." 
In such terms as these the Oceanic Allies could 
now state their war- will and carry the world 
straightway into a new phase of human history. 
They could, but they do not. For alas ! not one of 
them is free from the entanglements of past things ; 
when we look for the wisdom of statesmen we find 
the cunning of politicians; when open speech and 
plain reason might save the world, courts, bureau- 
crats, financiers or profiteers conspire. 



VII 

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY 

From the very outset of this war it was manifest 
to the clear-headed observer that only the complete 
victory of German imperialism could save the 
dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it 
had challenged. That curious system had been the 
natural and unplanned development of the political 
complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries. Two systems of monarchies, the Bour- 
bon system and the German, then ruled Europe 
between them. With the latter was associated the 
tradition of the European unity under the Roman 
empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an itch to 
be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hun- 
garian empire and the Czar had, so to speak, the 
prior claim to the title. The Prussian king set up 
as a Csesar in 1871 ; Queen Victoria became the 
Caesar of India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices 
of Lord Beaconsfield, and last and least that most 
detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 
gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by set- 
ting up as Czar of Bulgaria. The weakening of 
the Bourbon system by the French revolution and 

84 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 85 

the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the 
complete ascendancy of the Germanic monarchies 
in spite of the breaking away of the United States 
from that system. 

After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teu- 
tonic monarchs, of which the German Emperor, the 
German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were 
the greatest stars, formed a caste apart, inter- 
married only among themselves, dominated the 
world and was regarded wdth a mystical awe by 
the ignorant and foolish in most European coun- 
tries. The marriages, the funerals, the corona- 
tions, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols 
were matters of almost universal worship. The 
Czar and Queen Victoria professed also to be the 
heads of religion upon earth. The court-centered 
diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies 
steered all the great liberating movements of the 
nineteenth century into monarchical channels. 
Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the mother- 
land of republics, w^as handed over to a needy scion 
of the Danish royal family ; the sturdy peasants of 
Bulgaria suffered from a kindred imposition. 
Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king 
as it would stand, as a condition of its independ- 
ence. At the dawn of the twentieth century repub- 
lican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the 
confines of Switzerland and France — and it had 



80 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

no vei Y secure air in France. Eeactionary schem- 
ing has been an intermittent fever in the French 
republic for six and fortj years. The French 
foreign office is still undemocratic in tradition and 
temper. But for the restless disloyalty of the IIo- 
henzollerns this German kingly caste might be 
dominating the world to this day. 

Of course the stability of this Teutonic dynastic 
system in Europe — which will presently seem to 
the student of history so curious a halting-place 
upon the way to human unity — rested very largely 
upon the maintenance of peace. It was the failure 
to understand this on the part of the German and 
Bulgarian rulers in particular that has now 
brought all monarchy to the question. The im- 
plicit theory that supported the intermarrying Ger- 
man royal families in Europe was that their inter- 
relationship and their aloofness from their sub- 
jects was a mitigation of national and racial ani- 
mosities. In the days when Queen Victoria was 
the grandmother of Europe this was a plausible 
argument. King, Czar and Emperor, or Emperor 
and Emperor would meet, and it was understood that 
these meetings were the lubrication of European 
affairs. The monarch s married largely, conspicu- 
ously, and very expensively for our good. Royal 
funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and 
jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade 



TJJE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 87 

everywhere. They seemed to give a raison d'etre 
for mankind. It is the Emperor William and the 
Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only hu- 
manity but their own strange caste by shattering 
all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of Kant 
is justified, and we know now that kings cause 
w^ars. It needed the shock of the great war to 
bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of 
Konigsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. 
Moreover in support of the dynastic system w^as the 
fact that it did exist as the system in possession, 
and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary 
of disturbing existing things. Life is full of ves- 
tigial structures, and it is a long way to logical 
perfection. Let us keep on, they would argue, with 
what we have. And another idea which, rightly or 
wrongly, made men patient with the emperors and 
kings was an exaggerated idea of the insecurity of 
republican institutions. 

You can still hear very old dull men say gravely 
that "kings are better than pronunciamentos " ; 
there was an article upon Greece to this effect quite 
recently in that uncertain paper The New States- 
man. Then a kind of illustrative gesture would 
be made to the South American republics, although 
the internal disturbances of the South American 
republics have diminished to very small dimensions 
in the last three decades and although pronuncia- 



88 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

mentos rarely disturb the traffic in Switzerland, 
the United States, or France. But there can be no 
doubt that the influence of the Germanic monarchy 
up to the death of Queen Victoria upon British 
thought was in the direction of estrangement from 
the two great modern republics and in the direction 
of assistance and propitiation to Germany. We 
surrendered Heligoland, we made great concessions 
to German colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves 
to be jockeyed into a phase of dangerous hostility 
to France. A practice of sneering at things Ameri- 
can has died only very recently out of English 
journalism and literature, as any one who cares to 
consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and 
•eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in 
these days not to forget Colonel Marchand, if only 
to remember that such a clash must never recur. 
But in justice to our monarchy we must remember 
that after the death of Queen Victoria, the spirit, 
if not the forms, of British kingship was greatly 
modified by the exceptional character and ability 
of King Edward VII. He was curiously anti- 
German in spirit; he had essentially democratic 
instincts ; in a few precious years he restored good 
will between France and Great Britain. It is no 
slight upon his successor to doubt whether any one 
could have handled the present opportunities and 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 89 

risks of monarchy in Great Britain as Edward 
could have handled them. 

Because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in 
the British Empire it must speedily undergo the 
profoundest modification. The old state of affairs 
cannot continue. The European dynastic system, 
based upon the intermarriage of a group of mainly 
German royal families, is dead to-day ; it is freshly 
dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the Incas. It 
is idle to close our eyes to this fact. The revolu- 
tion in Eussia, the setting up of a republic in China, 
demonstrating the ripeness of the East for free 
institutions, the entry of the American republics 
into world politics — these things slam the door 
on any idea of working back to the old nineteenth- 
century system. People calls to peox}le. " No 
peace with the Hohenzollerns '' is a cry that carries 
with it the final repudiation of emperors and 
kings. The man in the street will assure you he 
wants no diplomatic peace. Beyond the unstable 
shapes of the present the political forms of the 
future rise now so clearly that they are the common 
talk of men. Kant's lucid thought told us long 
ago that the peace of the world demanded a world 
union of republics. That is a commonplace remark 
now in every civilized community. 

The stars in their courses, the logic of circum- 



90 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

stances, the everyday needs and everyday intelli- 
gence of men, all these things march irresistibly 
towards a permanent world peace based on demo- 
cratic republicanism-. The question of the future 
of monarchy is not whether it will be able to resist 
and overcome that trend; it has as little chance 
of doing that as the Lama of Thibet has of becom- 
ing Emperor of the Earth. It is whether it will 
resist openly, become the centre and symbol of a 
reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and 
swept away altogether everywhere, as the Roman- 
offs have already been swept away in Russia, or 
whether it will be able in this country and that to 
adapt itself to the necessities of the great age that 
dawns upon mankind, to take a generous and help- 
ful attitude towards its own modifications, and so 
survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air. 

It is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy 
in the British Empire to speak of the British system 
as a crowned republic. That is an attractive 
phrase to people of republican sentiments. It is 
quite conceivable that the British Empire may be 
able to make that phrase a reality and that the 
royal line may continue, a line of hereditary presi- 
dents, with some of the ancient trappings and 
something of the picturesque prestige that, as the 
oldest monarchy in Europe, it has to-day. Two 
kings in Europe have already gone far towards 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 91 

realizing this conception of a life president; both 
the King of Italy and the King of Norway live as 
simply as if they were in the White House and are 
far more accessible. Along that line the British 
monarchy must go if it is not to go altogether. 
Will it go along those lines? 

There are many reasons for hoping that it will 
do so. The Times has styled the crown the 
" golden link " of the empire. Australians and 
Canadians, it was argued, had little love for the 
motherland but the greatest devotion to the 
sovereign, and still truer was this of Indians, 
Egyptians, and the like. It might be easy to press 
this theory of devotion too far, but there can be 
little doubt that the British Crown does at present 
stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as 
no other crown, unless it be that of Austria- 
Hungary, can be said to do. The British crown is 
not like other crowns; it may conceivably take a 
line of its own and emerge — possibly a little more 
like a hat and a little less like a crown — from 
trials that may destroy every other monarchial 
system in the world. 

Now many things are going on behind the scenes, 
many little indications peep out upon the specula- 
tive watcher and vanish again; but there is very 
little that is definite to go upon at the present time 
to determine how far the monarchy will rise to the 



92 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

needs of this great occasion. Certain acts and 
changes, the initiative to which would come most 
gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at 
this present time. They may be done quite soon. 
Upon the doing of them wait great masses of public 
opinion. The first of these things is for the British 
monarchy to sever itself definitely from the Ger- 
man dynastic system with which it is so fatally en- 
tangled by marriage and descent, and to make its 
intention of becoming henceforth more and more 
British in blood as well as spirit, unmistakably 
plain. This idea has been put forth quite promi- 
nently in the Times. The king has been asked to 
give his countenance to the sweeping away of all 
those restrictions first set up by George the Third, 
upon the marriage of the Royal Princes with Brit- 
ish, French and American subjects. The British 
Empire is very near the limit of its endurance of a 
kingly caste of Germans. The choice of British 
royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot 
be indefinitely delayed. Were it made now pub- 
licly and boldly, there can be no doubt that the 
decision would mean a renascence of monarchv, a 
considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the 
Empire. There are times when a king or queen 
must need be dramatic and must a little anticipate 
occasions. It is not seemly to make concessions 
perforce ; kings may not make obviously unwilliug 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 93 

surrenders ; it is the indecisive kings who lose their 
crowns. 

No doubt the Anglicization of the royal family 
by national marriages w^ould gradually merge that 
family into the general body of the British peerage. 
Its consequent loss of distinction might be accom- 
panied by an associated fading out of function, 
until the King became at last hardly more func- 
tional than was the late Duke of Norfolk as premier 
peer. Possibly that is the most desirable course 
from many points of view. 

It must be admitted that the abandonment of 
marriages within the royal caste and a bold attempt 
to introduce a strain of British blood in the royal 
family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if 
the British king is indeed to become the crowned 
president of his people and the nominal and ac- 
cepted leader of the movement towards republican 
institutions. A thing that is productive of an 
enormous amount of republican talk in Great 
Britain is the suspicion — I believe an ill-founded 
suspicion — that there are influences at work at 
court antagonistic to republican institutions in 
friendly states and that there is a disposition even 
to sacrifice the interests of the liberal allies to 
dynastic sympathies. These things are not to be 
believed, but it would be a feat of vast impressive- 
ness if there were something like a royal and public 



9:i THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinsliip. The 
behaviour of the Allies towards that great Balkan 
statesman Venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly 
Greek republicans in favour of the manifestly 
treacherous King of Greece, has produced the 
deepest shame and disgust in many quarters that 
are altogether friendly, that are even warmly 
" loyal '^ to the British monarchy. 

And in a phase of tottering thrones it is very 
undesirable that the British habit of asylum should 
be abused. We have already in England the de- 
throned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no 
doubt duly looked after. In the future there may 
be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower 
of emperors and kings. We do not want Great 
Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting 
and the starting-point of restoration raids into the 
territories of emancipated peoples. This is par- 
ticularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser's 
death — which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern 
mortality cannot be delayed now for many years — 
the present Crown Prince goes a-wandering. We 
do not want any German ex-monarchs; Sweden is 
always open to them and friendly, and to Sweden 
they ought to go; and j)articularly do British peo- 
ple dread an irruption of Hohenzollerns or Co- 
burgers. Almost as undesirable w^ould be the 
arrival of the Czar and Czarina. It is supremely 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 95 

important that no wind of suspicion should blow 
between us and the freedom of Russia, After the 
war even more than during the war will the enemy 
be anxious to sow discord between the great Rus- 
sian-speaking and English speaking democracies. 
Quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant do- 
mesticities, the establishment of the Czar and Czar- 
ina in England with frequent and easy access to our 
royal family may be extraordinaril}^ unfortunate 
for the British monarchy. I will confess a certain 
sympathy for the Czar myself. He is not an evil 
figure, he is not a strong figure, but he has that sort 
of weakness, that failure in decision, w^hich trails 
revolution in its w^ake. He has ended one dynasty 
already. The British royal family owes it to itself, 
that he bring not the infection of his misfortunes 
to Windsor. 

The security of the British monarchy lies in such 
a courageous severance of its destinies from the 
Teutonic dynastic system. Will it make that sever- 
ance? There I share an almost universal igno- 
rance. The loyalty of the British is not to w^hat 
kings are too prone to call " my person," not to a 
chosen and admired family, but to a renascent man- 
kind. We have fought in this w^ar for Belgium, for 
France, for general freedom, for civilization and the 
whole future of mankind, far more than for our- 
selves. We have not fought for a king. We are 



96 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

discovering in that spirit of human unity that lies 
below the idea of a League of Free Nations the real 
invisible Idng of onr heart and race. But we will 
very gladly go on with our task under a nominal 
king unless he hampers us in the task that grows 
ever more plainly before us. . . . That, I think, is 
a fair statement of British public opinion on this 
question. But every day when I am in London I 
walk past Buckingham Palace to lunch at my club, 
and I look at that not very expressive fagade and 
wonder — and we all wonder — what thoughts are 
going on behind it and what acts are being con- 
ceived there. Out of it there might yet come some 
gesture of acceptance magnificent enough to set 
beside President Wilson's magnificent declaration 
of war. . . , 

These are things in the scales of fate. I will not 
pretend to be able to guess even which way the 
scales will swing. 



VIII 

THE PLAIN NECESSITY FOR A LEAGUE 

Great as the sacrifices of prejudice and preconcep- 
tion which any effective realization of this idea of a 
League of Free Nations will demand, difficult as the 
necessary delegations of sovereignty must be, none 
the less are such sacrifices and difficulties unavoid- 
able. People in France and Italy and Great Brit- 
ain and Germany alike have to subdue their minds 
to the realization that some such League is now a 
necessity for them if their peace and national life 
are to continue. There is no prospect before them 
but either some such League or else great humilia- 
tion and disastrous warfare driving them down to- 
wards social dissolution ; and for the United States 
it is only a question of a little longer time before 
the same alternatives have to be faced. 

Whether this war ends in the complete defeat of 
Germany and German imperialism, or in a revolu- 
tionary modernization of Germany, or in a prac- 
tical triumph for the HohenzoUerns, are considera- 
tions that affect the nature and scope of the 
League, but do not affect its essential necessity. In 
the first two cases the League of Free Nations will 

97 



98 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

be a world league including Germany as a prin- 
cipal partner, in the latter case the League of Free 
Nations will be a defensive league standing stead- 
fast against the threat of a world imperialism, and 
watching and restraining with one common will the 
homicidal maniac in its midst. But in all these 
cases there can be no great alleviation of the evils 
that now blacken and threaten to ruin human life 
altogether, unless all the civilized and peace-seeking 
peoples of the world are pledged and locked to- 
gether under a common law and a common world 
policy. There must rather be an intensification 
of these evils. There must be wars more evil than 
this war continuing this war, and more destructive 
of civilized life. There can be no peace and hope 
for our race but an organized peace and hope, 
armed against disturbance as a state is armed 
against mad, ferocious, and criminal men. 

Now, there are two chief arguments, running one 
into the other, for the necessity of merging our ex- 
isting sovereignties into a greater and, if possible, 
a world-wide league. The first is the present geo- 
graphical impossibility of nearly all the existing 
European states and empires ; and the second is the 
steadily increasing disproportion between the tor- 
tures and destructions inflicted by modern warfare 
and any possible advantages that may arise from it. 
Underlying both arguments is the fact that modern 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 99 

developments of meclianical science have brought 
the nations of Europe together into too close a 
proximity. This present war, more than anything 
else, is a violent struggle between old political ideas 
and new antagonistic conditions. 

It is the unhappy usage of our schools and uni- 
versities to study the history of mankind only dur- 
ing periods of mechanical unprogressiveness. The 
historical ideas of Europe range between the time 
when the Greeks were going about the world on foot 
or horseback or in galleys or sailing ships to the 
da3^s when Napoleon, \Tellington, and Nelson were 
going about at very much the same pace in much 
the same vehicles and vessels. At the advent of 
steam and electricity the muse of history holds her 
nose and shuts her eyes. Science will study and 
get the better of a modern disease, as, for example, 
sleeping sickness, in spite of the fact that it has no 
classical standing; but our history schools would be 
shocked at the bare idea of studying the effect of 
modern means of communication u]3on administra- 
tive areas, large or small. This defect in our his- 
torical training has made our minds politically 
sluggish. We fail to adapt readily enough. In 
small things and great alike we are trying to run 
the world in areas marked out in or before the eight- 
eenth century, regardless of the fact that a man or 
an army or an aeroplane can get in a few minutes or 



100 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

a few hours to points that it would have taken days 
or weeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse con- 
ditions. That matters nothing to the learned men 
who instruct our statesmen and politicians. It 
matters everything from the point of view of social 
and economic and political life. And the grave 
fact to consider is that all the great states of Eu- 
rope, except for the unification of Italy and Ger- 
many, are still much of the size and in much the 
same boundaries that made them strong and safe 
in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the clos- 
ing years of the foot-horse period. The British em- 
pire grew and was organized under those condi- 
tions, and had to modify itself only a little to meet 
the needs of steam shipping. All over the world 
are its linked possessions and its ports and coaling 
stations and fastnesses on the trade routes. And 
British people still look at the red-splashed map of 
the world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, 
blind to the swift changes that are making that 
scattered empire — if it is to remain an isolated 
system — almost the most dangerous conceivable. 
Let me ask the British reader who is disposed 
to sneer at the League of Nations and say he is very 
well content with the empire, thank you, to get his 
atlas and consider one or two propositions. And, 
first, let him think of aviation. I can assure him, 
because upon this matter I have some special knowl- 



THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 101 

edge, that long-distance air travel for men, for let- 
ters and light goods and for bombs, is continually 
becoming more practicable. But the air routes that 
air transport will follow must go over a certain 
amount of land, for this reason that every few hun- 
dred miles at the longest the machine must come 
down for petrol. A flying machine with a safe non- 
stop range of 1500 miles is still a long way off. It 
may indeed be permanently impracticable because 
there seems to be an upward limit to the size of an 
aeroplane engine. And now will the reader take 
the map of the world and study the air routes from 
London to the rest of the empire? He will find 
them perplexing — if he wants them to be " All- 
Eed.^' Happily this is not a British difficulty only. 
Will he next study the air routes from Paris to the 
rest of the French j)OSsessions? And, finally, will 
he study the air routes out of Germany to any- 
where? The Germans are as badly off as any peo- 
ple. But we are all badly off. So far as world air 
transit goes any country can, if it chooses, choke 
any adjacent country. Directly any trade diffi- 
culty breaks out, any country can begin a vexatious 
campaign against its neighbour's air traffic. It can 
oblige it to alight at the frontier, to follow pre- 
scribed routes, to land at specified places on those 
routes and undergo examinations that will waste 
precious hours. But so far as I can see, no Euro- 



102 THE LEAGUE OP FREE NATIONS 

pean statesman, German or Allied, have begun to 
give their attention to this amazing difficulty. 
Without a great pooling of air control, either a 
world-wide pooling or a pooling at least of the 
Atlantic-Mediterranean Allies in one Air League, 
the splendid peace poKSsibilities of air transport — 
and they are indeed splendid — must remain very 
largely a forbidden possibility to mankind. 

And as a second illustration of the way in which 
changing conditions are altering political ques- 
tions, let the reader take his atlas and consider the 
case of that impregnable fastness, that great naval 
station, that Key to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar. 
British boys are brought up on Gibraltar and the 
Gibraltar idea. To the British imagination Gib- 
raltar is almost as sacred a national symbol as the 
lions in Trafalgar Square. Now, in his atlas the 
reader will almost certainly find an inset map of 
this valuable possession, coloured bright red. The 
inset map will have attached to it a small scale of 
miles. From that he will be able to satisfy himself 
that there is not an inch of the rock anywhere that 
is not within five miles or less of Spanish land, and 
that there is rather more than a semicircle of hills 
round the rock within a range of seven or eight 
miles. That is much less than the range of a six- 
teen-inch gun. In other words, the Spaniards are 
in a position to knock Gibraltar to bits whenever 



THE LEAGUE OF FEEE NATIONS 103 

they want to do so, or to smash and sink any ships 
in its harbour. They can hit it on every side. 
Consider, moreover, that there are long svi^eeps of 
coast north, south, and Avest of the Rock, from 
which torpedoes could be discharged at any ship 
that approached. Inquire further where on the 
Eock an aeroplane can land. And having ascer- 
tained these things, ask yourself what is the present 
value of Gibraltar? 

I will not multiply disagreeable instances of this 
sort, though it would be easy enough to do so in the 
case both of France and Italy as well as of Great 
Britain. I give them as illustrations of the way in 
which everywhere old securities and old arrange- 
ments must be upset by the greater range of modern 
things. Let us get on to more general conditions. 
There is not a capital city in Europe that twenty 
years from now will not be liable to a bombing raid 
done by hundreds or even thousands of big aero- 
planes, upon or even before a declaration of war, and 
there is not a line of sea communication that will 
not be as promptly interrupted by the hostile sub- 
marine. I point these things out here only to carry 
home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolation 
and detachment that were perfectly valid in 1900, 
the self-sufflcient empire, Imperial Zollverein and 
all that stuff, and damn the foreigner ! are now, be- 
cause of the enormous changes in range of action 



104 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

and facility of locomotion that have been going on, 
almost as wild — or would be if we were not so fa- 
tally accustomed to them^ — and quite as dangerous, 
as the idea of setting up a free and sovereign state 
in the Isle of Dogs. All the European empires are 
becoming vulnerable at every point. Surely the 
moral is obvious. The only wise course before the 
allied European powers now is to put their national 
conceit in their pockets and to combine to lock up 
their foreign policy, their trade interests, and all 
their imperial and international interests into a 
League so big as to be able to withstand the most 
sudden and treacherous of blows. And surely the 
only completely safe course for them and mankind 
— hard and nearly impossible though it may seem 
at the present juncture — is for them to lock up 
into one unity with a democratized Germany and 
with all the other states of the earth into one peace- 
maintaining League. 

If the reader will revert again to his atlas he will 
see very clearly that a strongly consolidated League 
of Free Nations, even if it consisted only of our 
present allies, would in itself form a combination 
with so close a system of communication about the 
world, and so great an economic advantage, that in 
the long run it could oblige Germany and the rest 
of the world to come in to its council. Divided the 
Oceanic Allies are, to speak plainly, geographical 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 105 

rags and nakedness ; united they are a world. To 
set about organizing that League now, with its 
necessary repudiation on the part of Britain, 
France, and Italy, of a selfish and, it must be re- 
membered in the light of these things I have but 
hinted at here, a now hopelessly iinpracticahle im- 
perialism, would, I am convinced, lead quite rapidly 
to a great change of heart in Germany and to a 
satisfactory peace. But even if I am wrong 
in that, then all the stronger is the reason for bind- 
ing, locking and uniting the allied powers together. 
It is the most dangerous of delusions for each 
and all of them to suppose that either Britain, 
France or Italy can ever stand alone again and be 
secure. 

And turning now to the other aspect of these 
consequences of the development of material sci- 
ence, it is too often assumed that this war is being 
as horrible and destructive as war can be. There 
never was so great a delusion. This war has only 
begun to be horrible. No doubt it is much more 
horrible and destructive than any former war, but 
even in comparison with the full possibilities of 
known and existing means of destruction it is still a 
mild war. Perhaps it will never rise to its full 
possibilities. At the present stage there is not a 
combatant, except perhaps America, which is not 
now practising a pinching economy of steel and 



106 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

other mechanical material. The Germans are run- 
ning short of first-class flying men, and if we and 
onr allies continue to press the air attack, and seek 
out and train our ov/n vastly greater resources of 
first quality young airmen, the Germans may come 
as near to being ^^ driven out of the air " as is pos- 
sible. I am a firmer believer than ever I was in 
the possibility of a complete victory over Germany 
— through and by the air. But the occasional 
dropping of a big bomb or so in London is not to be 
taken as anything but a minimum display of what 
air war can do. In a little while now our alliance 
should be in a position to commence day and night 
continuous attacks upon the Rhine towns. Not 
hour-long raids such as London knows, but week- 
long raids. Then and then only shall we be able 
to gauge the really horrible possibilities of the air 
war. They are in our hands and not in the hands 
of the Germans. In addition the Germans are at a 
huge disadvantage in their submarine campaign. 
Their submarine campaign is only the feeble 
shadow of what a submarine campaign might be. 
Turning again to the atlas the reader can see for 
himself that the German and Austrian submarines 
are obliged to come out across very narrow fronts. 
A fence of mines less than three hundred miles long 
and two hundred feet deep would, for example, com- 
pletely bar their exit through the North Sea. The 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 107 

U-boats run the gauntlet of that long narrow sea 
and pay a heavy toll to it. If only our Admiralty 
would tell the German public what that toll is now, 
there would come a time when German seamen 
would no longer consent to go down in them. Con- 
sider, however, what a submarine campaign would 
be for Great Britain if instead of struggling 
through this bottleneck it were conducted from the 
coast of Norway, where these pests might harbour 
in a hundred fiords. Consider too what this 
weapon may be in twenty years' time in the hands of 
a country in the position of the United States. 
Great Britain, if she is not altogether mad, will 
cease to be an island as soon as possible after the 
war, by piercing the Channel Tunnel — how different 
our transj)ort problem Avould be if we had that now ! 
— but such countries as Australia, New Zealand, 
and Japan, directly they are involved in the future 
in a war against any efficient naval power with an 
unimpeded sea access, will be isolated forthwith. I 
cannot conceive that any of the great ocean powers 
will rest content until such a tremendous possibility 
of blockade as the submarine has created is securely 
vested in the hands of a common league beyond any 
power of sudden abuse. 

It must always be remembered that this war is 
a mechanical war conducted by men whose disci- 
pline renders them uninventive, who know little or 



108 THE LEAGUE OF FKEE NATIONS 

nothing of mechanism, who are for the most part 
struggling blindly to get things back to the condi- 
tions for which they ^vere trained, to Napoleonic 
conditions, with infantry and cavalry and compara- 
tively light guns, the so-called " war of manoeuvres.- ^ 
It is like a man engaged in a desperate duel who 
keeps on trying to make it a game of cricket. Most 
of these soldiers detest every sort of mechanical 
device; the tanks, for example, which, used with 
imagination, might have given the British and 
French overw^helming victory on the western front, 
w^ere subordinated to the usual cavalry ^^ break 
through -^ idea. I am not making any particular 
complaint against the British and French generals 
in saying this. It is what must happen to any 
country which entrusts its welfare to soldiers. A 
soldier has to be a severely disciplined man, and a 
severely disciplined man cannot be a versatile man, 
and on the whole the British army has been as re- 
ceptive to novelties as any. The German generals 
have done no better; indeed, they have not done so 
well as the generals of the Allies in this respect. 
But after the war, if the world does not organize 
rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a 
little, the mechanical genius will get to work on the 
possibilities of these ideas that have merely been 
sketched out in this war. We shall get big land 
ironclads which will smash towns. We shall get 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 109 

air offensives — let the experienced London reader 
think of an air raid going on hour after hour, day 
after day — that will really burn out and wreck 
towns, that will drive people mad by the thousand. 
We shall get a very complete cessation of sea tran- 
sit. Even land transit may be enormously ham- 
pered by aerial attack. I doubt if any sort of social 
order will really be able to stand the strain of a 
fully worked out modern war. We have still, of 
course, to feel the full shock effects even of this war. 
Most of the combatants are going on, as sometimes 
men who have incurred grave wounds will still go 
on for a time — without feeling them. The educa- 
tional, biological, social, economic punishment that 
has already been taken by each of the European 
countries is, I feel, very much greater than we yet 
realize. Russia, the heaviest and worst-trained 
combatant, has indeed shown the effects and is 
down and sick, but in three years' time all Europe 
will know far better than it does now the full price 
of this war. And the shock effects of the next war 
will have much the same relation to the shock effects 
of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to 
the shock of crushing in a body. In Russia to-day 
we have seen, not indeed social revolution, not the 
replacement of one social order by another, but dis- 
integration. Let not national conceit blind us. 
Germany, France, Italy, Britain are all slipping 



110 THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 

about on that same slope down which Russia has 
slid. Which goes first, it is hard to guess, or 
whether we shall all hold out to some kind of Peace. 
At present the social discipline of France and Brit- 
ain seems to be at least as good as that of Germany, 
and the morale of the Rhineland and Bavaria has 
probably to undergo very severe testing by system- 
atized and steadily increasing air punishment as 
this year goes on. The next war — if a next war 
comes — will see all Germany, from end to end, 
vulnerable to aircraft. . . . 

Such are the two sets of considerations that will, 
I think ultimately prevail over every prejudice and 
every difficulty in the way of the League of Free 
Nations. Existing states have become impossible 
as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new 
conditions bring them so close together and give 
them such extravagant powers of mutual injury 
that they must either sink national pride and dynas- 
tic ambitions in subordination to the common wel- 
fare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. 
It becomes more and more plainly a choice between 
the League of Free Nations and a famished race of 
men looting in search of non-existent food amidst 
the smouldering ruins of civilization. In the end 
I believe that the common sense of mankind will 
prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and im- 
perialism, to the latter alternative. It may take 



THE LEAGUE OF FREE NATIONS 111 

obstinate men a few more years yet of blood and 
horror to learn this lesson, but for my own part I 
cherish an obstinate belief in the potential reason- 
ableness of mankind. 



IX 

DEMOCRACY 

All the talk, all the aspiration and work that is 
making now towards this conception of a world 
securely at peace, under the direction of a League 
of Free Nations, has interwoven with it an idea that 
is often rather felt than understood, the idea of 
Democracy. Not only is justice to prevail between 
race and race and nation and nation, but also be- 
tween man and man; there is to be a universal 
respect for human life throughout the earth; the 
world, in the words of President Wilson, is to be 
made " safe for democracy." I would like to sub- 
ject that word to a certain scrutiny to see whether 
the things we are apt to think and assume about it 
correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. 
I would like to ask what, under modern conditions, 
does democracy mean, and whether we have got it 
now anywhere in the world in its fulness and com- 
pletion. 

And to begin with I must have a quarrel with 
the word itself. The eccentricities of modern edu- 
cation make us dependent for a number of our pri- 
mary political terms upon those used by the think- 
ers of the small Greek republics of ancient times 

112 



DEMOCKACY 113 

before those petty states collapsed, through sheer 
political ineptitude, before the Macedonians. They 
thought in terms of states so small that it was pos- 
sible to gather all the citizens together for the pur- 
poses of legislation. These states were scarcely 
more than what we English might call sovereign 
urban districts. Fast communications were made 
by runners; even the policeman with a bicycle of 
the modern urban district was beyond the scope of 
the Greek imagination. There were no railways, 
telegraphs, telephones, books or newspapers, there 
was no need for the state to maintain a system of 
education, and the affairs of the state were so simple 
that they could be discussed and decided by the 
human voice and open voting in an assembly of all 
the citizens. That is what democracy meant. In 
Andorra, or perhaps in Canton Uri, such democracy 
may still be possible; in any other modern state it 
cannot exist. The opposite term to it was olig- 
archy, in which a small council of men controlled 
the affairs of the state. Oligarchy, narrowed down 
to one man, became monarchy. If you wished to 
be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristoc- 
racy ; if you wished to point out that a monarch was 
rather by way of being self-appointed, you called 
him a Tyrant. An oligarchy with a property quali- 
fication was a plutocracy. 

Xow the modern intelligence, being under a sort 



114 DEMOCRACY 

of magic slavery to the ancient Greeks, has to adapt 
all these terms to the problems of states so vast and 
complex that they have the same relation to the 
Greek states that the anatomy of a man has to the 
anatomy of a jellyfish. They are not only greater 
in extent and denser in population, but they are in- 
creasingly innervated by more and more rapid 
means of communication and excitement. In the 
classical past — except for such special cases as 
the feeding of Rome with Egyptian corn — trade 
was a traffic in luxuries or slaves, war a small spe- 
cialized affair of infantry and horsemen in search 
of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of trib- 
ute. The modern state must conduct its enormous 
businesses through a system of ministries; its vital 
interests go all round the earth; nothing that any 
ancient Greek would have recognized as democracy 
is conceivable in a great modern state. It is abso- 
lutely necessary, if we are to get things clear in our 
minds about what democracy really means in rela- 
tion to modem politics, first to make a quite fresh 
classification in order to find what items there really 
are to consider, and then to inquire which seem to 
correspond more or less closely in spirit with our 
ideas about ancient democracy. 

Now there are two primary classes of ideas about 
government in the modern world depending upon 
our conception of the political capacitj^ of the com- 



DEMOCrvACY 115 

mon man. We may supi30se he is a microcosm, 
with complete ideas and \yishes about the state and 
the world, or we may suppose that he isn't. We 
may believe that the common man can govern, or 
we may believe that he can't. We may think 
further along the first line that he is so wise and 
good and right that we only have to get out of his 
way for him to act rightly and for the good of all 
mankind, or we may doubt it. And if we doubt 
that we may still believe that, though perhaps " you 
can fool all the people some of the time, and some of 
the people all the time,'' the common man, express- 
ing himself by a majority vote, still remains the 
secure source of human wisdom. But next, while 
we may deny this universal distribution of political 
wisdom, we may, if we are sufficiently under the 
sway of modern ideas about collective psychology, 
believe that it is necessary to poke up the political 
indifference and inability of the common man as 
much as possible, to thrust political ideas and facts 
upon him, to incite him to a watchful and critical 
attitude towards them, and above all to secure his 
assent to the proceedings of the able people who 
are managing public affairs. Or finally, we may 
treat him as a thing to be ruled and not consulted. 
Let me at this stage make out a classificatory dia- 
gram of the elementary ideas of government in a 
modern country. 



116 DEMOCRACY 

Class I. It is supposed that the common man 
can govern : 

(1) without further organization (Anarchy) ; 

(2) through a majority vote by delegates. 
Class II. It is supposed that the common man 

cannot govern, and that government therefore must 
be through the agency of Able Persons who may be 
classified under one of the following sub-heads, 
either as 

(1) persons elected by the common man be- 

cause he believes them to be persons able 
to govern — just as he chooses his doc- 
tors as persons able to secure health, 
and his electrical engineers as persons 
able to attend to his tramways, lighting, 
etc., etc. ; 

(2) persons of a special class, as, for example, 

persons born and educated to rule (e.g. 
Aristocracy) , or rich business adventur- 
ers {Plutocracy) who rule without con- 
sulting the common man at all. 

To which two sub-classes we may per- 
haps add a sort of intermediate stage 
between them, namely : 

(3) persons elected by a special class of voter. 
Monarchy may be either a special case of Class 

II (1), (2) or (3), in which the persons who rule 
have narrowed down in number to one person, and 



DEMOCKACY 117 

the duration of monarcliy may be either for life 
or a term of years. These two classes and the five 
sub-classes cover, I believe, all the elementary polit- 
ical types in our world. 

Now in the constitution of a modern state, be- 
cause of the conflict and confusion of ideas, all or 
most of these five sub-classes may usually be found 
intertwined. The British constitution, for in- 
stance, is a complicated tangle of arrangements, 
due to a struggle between the ideas of Class I (2), 
Class II (3), tending to become Class II (1) and 
Class II (2) in both its aristocratic and monarchist 
forms. The American constitution is largely domi- 
nated by Class I (2), from which it breaks away in 
the case of the President to a short-term monarchist 
aspect of Class II (1). I will not elaborate this 
classification further. I have made it here in order 
to render clear first, that what we moderns mean 
by democracy is not what the Greeks meant at all, 
that is to say, direct government by the assembly of 
all the citizens, and secondly and more important, 
that the word " democracy " is being used very 
largely in current discussion, so that it is impossible 
to say in any particular case whether the intention 
is Class I (2) or Class II (1), and that we have 
to make up our minds whether we mean, if I may 
coin two phrases, " delegate democracy • ' or " selec- 
tive democracy," or some definite combination of 



118 DEMOCRACY 

these two, when we talk about " democracy," before 
w^e can get on much beyond a generous gesture of 
equality and enfranchisement towards our brother 
man. The word is being used, in fact, confusingly 
for these two quite widely different things. 

Now, it seems to me that though there has been 
no very clear discussion of the issue between those 
two very opposite conceptions of democracy largely 
because of the want of proper distinctive terms, 
there has nevertheless been a wide movement of 
public opinion away from " delegate democracy '' 
and towards " selective democracy." People have 
gone on saying " democracy," while gradually 
changing its meaning from the former to the latter. 
It is notable in Great Britain, for example, that 
while there has been no perceptible diminution in 
our faith in democracy, there has been a growing 
criticism of '^ party " and " politicians," and a great 
weakening in the power and influence of represen- 
tatives and representative institutions. There has 
been a growing demand for personality and initia- 
tive in elected persons. The press, which was once 
entirely subordinate politically to parliamentary 
politics, adopts an attitude towards parliament and 
party leaders nowadays which would have seemed 
inconceivable insolence in the days of Lord Palmer- 
ston. And there has been a vigorous agitation in 
support of electoral methods which are manifestly 



DEMOCRACY 119 

calculated to subordinate "delegated" to "se- 
lected " men. 

The movement for electoral reform in Great Brit- 
ain at the present time is one of quite fundamental 
importance in the development of modern democ- 
racy. The case of the reformers is that heretofore 
modern democracy has not had a fair opportunity 
of showing its best possibilities to the world, be- 
cause the methods of election have persistently set 
aside the better types of public men, or rather of 
would-be public men, in favour of mere party hacks. 
That is a story common to Britain and the Ameri- 
can democracies, but in America it was expressed 
in rather different terms and dealt with in a less 
analytical fashion than it has been in Great Brit- 
ain. It was not at first clearly understood that the 
failure of democracy to produce good government 
came through the preference of " delegated " over 
" selected " men, the idea of delegation did in fact 
dominate the minds of both electoral reformers and 
electoral conservatives alike, and the earlier stages 
of the reform movement in Great Britain were in- 
spired not so much by the idea of getting a better 
type of representative as by the idea of getting a 
fairer representation of minorities. It was only 
slowly that the idea that sensible men do not usually 
belong to any political " party '' took hold. It is 
only now being realized that what sensible men 



120 DEMOCRACY 

desire in a member of parliament is honour and 
capacity rather than a mechanical loyalty to a 
" platform.'' They do not want to dictate to their 
representative; they want a man they can trust as 
their representative. In the fifties and sixties of 
the last century, in which this electoral reform 
movement began and the method of Proportional 
Representation was thought out, it was possible for 
the reformers to work untroubled upon the assump- 
tion that if a man was not necessarily born a 

". . . little Liber-al, 
or else a little Conservative,'* 

he must at least be a Liberal- Unionist or a Con- 
servative Free-Trader. But seeking a fair repre- 
sentation for party minorities, these reformers 
produce a system of voting at once simple and in- 
capable of manipulation, that leads straight, not to 
the representation of small parties, but to a type 
of democratic government by selected best men. 

Before giving the essential features of that sys- 
tem, it may be well to state in its simplest form 
the evils at which the reform aims. An election, 
the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it 
appears to be at the first blush. Methods of voting 
can be manipulated in various ways, and nearly 
every method has its own liability to falsification. 
We may take for illustration the commonest, sim- 



DEMOCRACY 121 

plest case — the case that is the perplexity of every 
clear- thinking voter under British or American 
conditions — the case of a constituency in which 
every elector has one vote, and which returns one 
representative to Parliament. The naive theory on 
which people go is that all the possible candidates 
are put up, that each voter votes for the one he 
likes best, and that the best man wins. The bitter 
experience is that hardly ever are there more than 
two candidates, and still more rarely is either of 
these the best man possible. Suppose, for example, 
the constituency is mainly Conservative. A little 
group of pothouse politicians, wire-pullers, busy- 
bodies, local journalists, and small lawyers, work- 
ing for various monetary interests, have " cap- 
tured " the local Conservative organization. They 
have time and energy to capture it, because they 
have no other interest in life except that. It is 
their "business," and honest men are busy with 
other duties. For reasons that do not appear these 
local " workers " put up an unknown Mr. Goldbug 
as the official Conservative candidate. He pro 
fesses a generally Conservative view of things, but 
few people are sure of him and few people trust 
him. Against him the weaker (and therefore still 
more venal) Liberal organization now puts up a 
Mr. Kentshire (formerly Wurstberg) to represent 
the broader thought and finer generosities of the 



122 DEMOCRACY 

English mind. A number of Conservative gentle- 
men, generally too busy about their honest busi- 
nesses to attend the party " smokers " and the party 
cave, realize suddenly that they want Goldbug 
hardly more than they want Wurstberg. They put 
up their long-admired, trusted, and able friend Mr. 
Sanity as an Independent Conservative. 

Every one knows the trouble that follows. Mr. 
Sanity is " going to split the party vote." The 
hesitating voter is told, with considerable truth, 
that a vote given for Mr. Sanity is a vote given for 
Wurstberg. At any price the constituency does not 
want Wurstberg. So at the eleventh hour Mr. 
Sanity is induced to withdraw, and Mr. Goldbug 
goes into Parliament to misrepresent this con- 
stituency. And so with most constituencies, and 
the result is a legislative body consisting largely of 
men of unknown character and obscure aims, whose 
only credential is the wearing of a party label. 
They come into parliament not to forward the great 
interests they ostensibly support, but with an eye 
to the railway jobbery, corporation business, con- 
cessions and financial operations that necessarily 
go on in and about the national legislature. That 
in its simplest form is the dilemma of democracy. 
The problem that has confronted modern democracy 
since its beginning has not really been the repre- 
sentation of organized minorities — they are very 



DEMOCRACY 123 

well able to look after themselves — but the pro- 
tection of the unorgayiized masses of busily occu- 
pied, fairly intelligent men from the tricks of 
the specialists who work the party machines. We 
know Mr. Sanity, we want Mr. Sanity, but we are 
too busy to watch the incessant intrigues to oust 
him in favour of the obscurely influential people, 
politically docile, who are favoured by the organ- 
ization. We want an organizer-proof method of 
voting. It is in answer to this demand, as the out- 
come of a most careful examination of the ways in 
which voting may be protected from the exploitation 
of those who work elections, that the method of 
Proportional Eepresentation with a single trans- 
ferable vote has been evolved. It is organizer- 
proof. It defies the caucus. If you do not like Mr. 
Goldbug you can put up and vote for Mr. Sanity, 
giving Mr. Goldbug your second choice, in the most 
perfect confidence that in any case your vote cannot 
help to return Mr. Wurstberg. 

With Proportional Representation with a single 
transferable vote (this specification is necessary, 
because there are also the inferior imitations of 
various election-riggers figuring as proportional 
representation), it is impossible to prevent the 
effective candidature of independent men of repute 
beside the official candidates. 

The method of voting under the Proportional 



124 DEMOCRACY 

Eepresentation system has been ignorantly repre- 
sented as complex. It is really almost ideally 
simple. You mark the list of candidates with num- 
bers in the order of your preference. For example, 
you believe A to be absolutely the best man for 
parliament; you mark him 1. But B you think is 
the next best man ; you mark him 2. That means 
that if A gets an enormous amount of support, ever 
so many more votes than he requires for his return, 
your vote will not be wasted. Only so much of 
your vote as is needed will go to A ; the rest will go 
to B. Or, on the other hand, if A has so little sup- 
port that his chances are hopeless, you will not have 
thrown your vote away upon him; it wall go to B. 
Similarly you may indicate a third, a fourth, and a 
fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name 
on your j^aper with a number to indicate the order 
of your preferences. And that is all the voter has 
to do. The reckoning and counting of the votes 
presents not the slightest difficulty to any one used 
to the business of computation. Silly and dis- 
honest men, appealing to still sillier audiences, have 
got themselves and their audiences into humorous 
muddles over this business, but the principles are 
perfectly plain and simple. Let me state them 
here; they can be fully and exactly stated, with 
various ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic 



DEMOCRACY 125 

remarks, and digressions, in seventy lines of this 
type. 

It will be evident that, in any election under 
this system, any one who has got a certain propor- 
tion of No. 1 votes will be elected. If, for instance, 
five people have to be elected and 20,000 voters vote, 
then any one who has got 4001 first votes or more 
must be elected. 4001 votes is in that case enough 
to elect a candidate. This sufficient number of 
votes is called the quota, and any one who has more 
than that number of votes has obviously got more 
votes than is needful for election. So, to begin 
with, the voting papers are classified according to 
their first votes, and any candidates who have got 
more than a quota of first votes are forthwith de- 
clared elected. But most of these elected men 
would under the old system waste votes because 
they would have too many. For manifestly a can- 
didate who gets more than the quota of votes needs 
only a fraction of each of these votes to return him. 
If for instance he gets double the quota he needs 
only half each vote. He takes that fraction, there- 
fore, and the rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 
upon that voting paper. And so on. Now this is 
an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled 
computer, and it is quite easily checked by any 
other accountant and skilled computer. A reader 



126 DEMOCRACY 

with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant of the 
very existence of such a thing as a side rule, know- 
ing nothing of book or account keeping, who thinks 
of himself working out the resultant fractions with 
a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad 
light, may easily think of this transfer of fractions 
as a dangerous and terrifying process. It is, for a 
properly trained man, the easiest, exactest job con- 
ceivable. The Cash Register people will invent 
machines to do it for you while you wait. What 
happens, then, is that every candidate with more 
than a quota, beginning with the top candidate, 
sheds a fraction of each vote he has received, down 
the list, and the next one sheds his surplus fraction 
in the same way, and so on until candidates lower 
in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill up 
to it. When all the surplus votes of the candidates 
at the head of the list have been disposed of, then 
the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list are 
dealt with. The second votes on their voting papers 
are treated as whole votes and distributed up the 
list, and so on. It will be plain to the quick- 
minded that, towards the end, there will be a cer- 
tain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and 
a slight modification of the quota due to voting 
papers having no second or third preferences 
marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be 
difficult for an untrained intelligence to follow. 



DEMOCRACY 127 

But untrained intelligences are not required to fol- 
low it. For the skilled computer these things 
offer no difficulty at all. And they are not diffi- 
culties of principle but of manipulation. One 
might as well refuse to travel in a taxicab until the 
driver had explained the magneto as refuse to ac- 
cept the principle of Proportional Representation 
by the single transferable vote until one had 
remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmetical 
education. The fundamental principle of the 
thing, that a candidate who gets more votes than he 
wants is made to hand on a fraction of each vote 
to the voter's second choice, and that a candidate 
whose chances are hopeless is made to hand on the 
whole vote to the voters second choice, so that prac- 
tically only a small number of votes are ineffective, 
is within the compass of the mind of a boy of ten. 

But simple as this method is, it completely kills 
the organization and manipulation of voting. It 
completely solves the Goldbug-Wurstberg- Sanity 
problem. It is knave-proof — short of forging, 
stealing, or destroying voting papers. A man of 
repute, a leaderly man, may defy all the party or- 
ganizations in existence and stand beside and be re- 
turned over the head of a worthless man, though 
the latter be smothered with party labels. That is 
the gist of this business. The difference in effect 
between Proportional Representation and the old 



128 DEMOCRACY 

method of voting must ultimately be to cliange tlie 
moral and intellectual quality of elected persons 
profoundly. Peoi)le are only beginning to realize 
the huge possibilities of advance inherent in this 
change of political method. It means no less than 
a revolution from " delegate democracy " to " selec- 
tive democracy.'^ 

Now, I will not pretend to be anything but a 
strong partizan in this matter. When I speak of 
" democracy -' I mean " selective democracy. '^ I 
believe that " delegate democracy '■ is already 
provably a failure in the world, and that the reason 
why today, after three and a half years of struggle, 
w^e are still fighting German autocracy and fighting 
with no certainty of absolute victory, is because the 
affairs of the three great Atlantic democracies have 
been largely in the hands not of selected men but 
of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party 
machine, of dodges rather than initiatives, second- 
rate men. When Lord Haldane, defending his 
party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation 
for the eventuality of the great war, pleaded that 
they had no " mandate • ' from the country to do 
anything of the sort, he did more than commit 
political suicide, he bore conclusive witness against 
the whole system which had made him what he was. 
Neither Britain nor France in this struggle has 
produced better statesmen nor better generals than 



DEMOCRACY 129 

the German autocracy. The British and French 
Foreign Offices are old monarchist organizations 
still. To this day the British and French poli- 
ticians haggle and argue with the German ministers 
upon petty points and debating society advantages, 
smart and cunning, while the peoples perish. The 
one man who has risen to the greatness of this great 
occasion, the man wdio is, in default of any rival, 
rapidly becoming the leader of the world towards 
peace, is neither a delegate jiolitician nor the choice 
of a monarch and his councillors. He is the one 
authoritative figure in these transactions whose 
mind has not been subdued either by long discipline 
in the party machine or by court intrigue, w^ho has 
continued his education beyond those early twenties 
when the mind of the " budding politician " ceases 
to expand, who has thought, and thought things 
out, who is an educated man among dexterous 
under-educated specialists. By something very 
like a belated accident in the framing of the Amer- 
ican constitution, the President of the United 
States is more in the nature of a selected man than 
any other conspicuous figure at the present time. 
He is specially elected by a special electoral college 
after an elaborate preliminary selection of candi- 
dates by the two great party machines. And be it 
remembered that Mr. Wilson is not the first great 
President the United States have had, he is one of a 



130 DEMOCKACY 

series of figures who tower over their European con- 
temporaries. The United States have had many 
advantageous circumstances to thank for their 
present ascendancy in the world's affairs : isolation 
from militarist pressure for a century and a quar- 
ter, a vast virgin continent, plenty of laud, freedom 
from centralization, freedom from titles and social 
vulgarities, common schools, a real democratic 
spirit in its people, and a great enthusiasm for uni- 
versities ; but no single advantage has been so great 
as this happy accident which has given it a spe- 
cially selected man as its voice and figurehead in 
the w^orld's affairs. In the average congressman, 
in the average senator, as Ostrogorski's great book 
so industriously demonstrated, the United States 
have no great occasion for pride. Neither the 
Senate nor the House of Representatives seem to 
rise above the level of the British Houses of Parlia- 
ment, with a Government unable to control the rebel 
forces of Ulster, unable to promote or dismiss gen- 
erals without an outcry, weakly amenable to the 
press, and terrifyingly incapable of great designs. 
It is to the United States of America we must look 
now if the world is to be made " safe for democ- 
racy.'^ It is to the method of selection, as dis- 
tinguished from delegation, that we must look if 
democracy is to be saved from itself. 



THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR 

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN 

GREAT BRITAIN 

British political life resists cleansing with all the 
vigour of a dirty little boy. It is nothing to your 
politician that the economic and social organization 
of all the world is strained almost to the pitch of 
collapse, and that it is vitally important to mankind 
that everywhere the whole will and intelligence of 
the race should be enlisted in the great tasks of 
making a permanent peace and reconstructing the 
shattered framework of society. These are remote, 
unreal considerations to the politician. What is 
the world to him? He has scarcely heard of it. 
He has been far too busy as a politician. He has 
been thinking of smart little tricks in the lobby and 
brilliant exploits at question time. He has been 
thinking of jobs and appointments, of whether Mr. 
Asquith is likely to " come back •' and how far it is 
safe to bank upon L. G. His one supreme purpose 
is to keep affairs in the hands of his own specialized 
set, to keep the old obscure party game going, to 

131 



132 DEMOCEACY 

rig his little tricks behind a vast, silly camouflage 
of sham issues, to keep out able men and disin- 
terested men, the public mind, and the general in- 
telligence from any effective interference with his 
disastrous manipulations of the common weal. 

I do not see how any intelligent and informed 
man can have followed the recent debates in the 
House of Commons upon Proportional Representa- 
tion without some very strong gusts of angry con- 
tempt. They were the most pitiful and alarming 
demonstration of the intellectual and moral quality 
of British public life at the present time. 

From the wire-pullers of the Fabian Society and 
from the party organizers of both Liberal and Tory 
party alike, and from the knowing cards, the pot- 
house shepherds, and jobbing lawyers who " work " 
the constituencies, comes the chief opposition to 
this straightening out of our electoral system so 
urgently necessary and so long overdue. They 
have fought it with a zeal and efficiency that is 
rarely displayed in the nation's interest. From 
nearly every outstanding man outside that little 
inner world of political shams and dodges, who has 
given any attention to the question, comes, on the 
other hand, support for this reform. Even the 
great party leaders, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, 
were in its favour. One might safely judge this 
question by considering who are the advocates on 



DEMOCRACY 133 

either side. But the best argument for Propor- 
tional Representation arise out of its opponents' 
speeches, and to these I will confine my attention 
now. Consider Lord Harcourt — heir to the most 
sacred traditions of the party game — hurling 
scorn at a project that would introduce " faddists, 
mugwumps," and so on and so on — in fact, inde- 
pendent thinking men — into the legislature. Con- 
sider the value of Lord Curzon's statement that 
London " rose in revolt •' against the project. Do 
you remember that day, dear reader, w^hen the 
streets of London boiled with passionate men shout- 
ing " No Proportional Representation ! Down 
with Proportional Representation"? You don't. 
Nor do I. But what happened was that the guinea- 
pigs and solicitors and nobodies, the party hacks 
who form the bulk of London's misrepresentation in 
the House of Commons, stampeded in terror against 
a proposal that threatened to wipe them out and re- 
place them by known and responsible men. Lon- 
don, alas! does not seem to care how its members 
are elected. What Londoner knows anything 
about his member? Hundreds of thousands of 
Londoners do not even know which of the ridicu- 
lous constituencies into which the politicians have 
dismembered our London they are in. Only when I 
was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court, 
Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was 



134 DEMOCKACY 

representing me in the councils of the nation while 
I write. . . . 

After some slight difficulty I ascertained that 
my representative is a Mr. Burdett Coutts, who 
was in the romantic eighties, Mr. Ashmead Bartlett. 
And by a convenient accident I find that the other 
day he moved to reject the Proportional Repre- 
sentation ximendment made by the House of Lords 
to the Representation of the Peox)le Bill, so that I 
am able to look up the debate in Hansard and 
study my opinions as he represented them and this 
question at one and the same time. And, taking 
little things first, I am proud and happy to discover 
that the member for me was the only participator 
in the debate? who, in the vulgar and reprehensible 
phrase, " threw a dead cat,'- or, in polite terms, dis- 
played classical learning. My member said, 
^^ Tinieo Danaos et dona f event es,'- with a rather 
graceful compliment to the Labour Conference at 
Nottingham. " I could not help thinking to my- 
self,'' said my member, "that at that conference 
there must have been many men of sufficient clas- 
sical reading to say to themselves, ' Timeo Danaos 
et dona ferentes/'^ In which surmise he was 
quite right. Except perhaps for '^ Tempus fugit/' 
^' verhum sap.,'' '' Arma virumque/' and '^ Quis cus- 
todiety' there is no better known relic of antiquity. 
But my member went a little beyond my ideas when 



DEMOCRACY 135 

he said : " We are asked to enter upon a metliod of 
legislation which can bear no other description than 
that of law-making in the dark/' because I think it 
can bear quite a lot of other descriptions. This 
was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, 
gloomy dissertation about nothing very definite, a 
muddling up of the main question with the minor 
issue of a schedule of constituencies involved in the 
proposal. 

The other parts of my member's speech do not, I 
confess, fill me with the easy confidence I would 
like to feel in my proxy. Let me extract a few 
gems of mere eloquence from this voice which 
speaks for me, and give also about the only argu- 
ment he advanced that needs consideration. " His- 
tory repeats itself,'' he said, " very often in curious 
ways as to facts, but generally with very different 
results." That, honestly, I like. It is a sentence 
one can read over several times. But he went on 
to talk of the entirely different scheme for minority 
representation, which was introduced into the 
Reform Bill of 1867, and there I am obliged to part 
company with him. That was a silly scheme for 
giving two votes to each voter in a three-member 
constituency. It has about as much resemblance 
to the method of scientific voting under discussion 
as a bath-chair has to an aeroplane. " But that 
measure of minority representation led to a baneful 



136 DEMOCRACY 

invention," my representative went on to say, " and 
left behind it a hateful memory in the Birmingham 
caucus. I v^ell remember that when I stood for 
Parliament thirty-two years ago we had no hetter 
platform weapon than repeating over and over 
again in a sentence the name of Mr. Schnadhorstj 
and I am not sure that it would not serve the same 
purpose now. Under that system the work of the 
caucus w^as, of course, far simpler than it will be if 
this system ever comes into operation. All the cau- 
cus had to do under that measure was to divide the 
electors into three groups and with three candi- 
dates, A., B., and C, to order one group to vote for 
A. and B., another for B. and C, and the third for 
A. and C, and they carried the whole of their can- 
didates and kept them for many years. But the 
multiplicity of ordinal preferences, second, third, 
fourth, fifth, up to tenth, which the single transfer- 
able vote system would involve, will require a more 
scientific handling in party interests, and neither 
party wall be able to face an election with any 
hope of success without the assistance of the most 
drastic form of caucus and without its orders being 
carried out by the electors/' 

Now, I swear by Heaven that, lowly creature as 
I am, a lost vote, a nothing, voiceless and helpless 
in public affairs, I am not going to stand the impu- 
tation that that sort of reasoning represents the 



DEMOCRACY 137 

average mental quality of Westminster — outside 
Parliament, tliat is. Most of my neighbours in St. 
James's Court, for example, have quite large pieces 
of head above their eyebrows. Read these above 
sentences over and ponder their significance — so 
far as they have any significance. Never mind my 
keen personal humiliation at this display of the 
mental calibre of my representative, but consider 
what the mental calibre of a House must be that did 
not break out into loud guffaws at such a passage. 
The line of argument is about as lucid as if one 
reasoned that because one can break a window with 
a stone it is no use buying a telescope. And it re- 
mains entirely a matter for speculation whether 
my member is arguing that a caucus can rig an elec- 
tion carried on under the Proportional Represen- 
tation system or that it cannot. At the first blush 
it seems to read as if he intended the former. But 
be careful! Did he? Let me suggest that in that 
last sentence he really expresses the opinion that it 
cannot. It can be read either way. Electors 
under modern conditions are not going to obey the 
" orders " of even the " most drastic caucus • ' — 
whatever a " drastic caucus ''may be. Why should 
they? In the Birmingham instance it was only a 
section of the majority, voting by wards, in an elec- 
tion on purely party lines, which " obeyed ■■ in order 
to keep out the minority party candidate. I think 



138 DEMOCRACY 

mjself that my member's mind waggled. Perhaps 
his real thoughts shone out through an argument 
not intended to betraj- them. What he does say as 
much as he says anything is that under Propor- 
tional Representation, elections are going to be very 
troublesome and difficult for party candidates. If 
that was his intention, then, after all, I forgive him 
much. I think that and more than that. I think 
that they are going to make party candidates who 
are merely party candidates impossible. That is 
exactly what we reformers are after. Then I shall 
get a representative more to my taste than Mr. 
Burdett Coutts. 

But let me turn now to the views of other people's 
representatives. 

Perhaps the most damning thing ever said 
against the present system, damning because of its 
empty absurdity, was uttered by Sir Thomas Whit- 
taker. He was making the usual exaggerations of 
the supposed difficulties of the method. He said 
English people didn't like such "complications." 
They like a " straight fight between two men." 
Think of it! A straight fight! For more than a 
quarter of a century I have been a voter, usually 
with votes in two or three constituencies, and never 
in all that long political life have I seen a single 
straight fight in an election, but only the dismallest 
sham fights it is possible to conceive. Thrice only 



DEMOCRACY 139 

in all that time have I cast a vote for a man whom 
I respected. On all other occasions the election 
that mocked my citizenship was either an arranged 
walk-over for one party or the other, or I had a 
choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously 
selected as candidates by obscure busy i)eople with 
local interests in the constituency. Every intelli- 
gent person knows that this is the usual experience 
of a free and independent voter in England. The 
" fight '■ of an ordinary Parliamentary election in 
England is about as " straight " as the business of 
a thimble rigger. 

And consider just what these " complications " 
are of which the opponents of Proportional Repre- 
sentation chant so loudly. In the sham election of 
to-day, which the politicians claim gives them a 
mandate to muddle up our affairs, the voter puts a 
X against the name of the least detestable of the 
two candidates that are thrust upon him. Under 
the Proportional Representation method there will 
be a larger constituency, a larger list of candidates, 
and a larger number of people to be elected, and he 
will put 1 against the name of the man he most 
wants to be elected, 2 against his second choice, and 
if he likes he may indulge in marking a third, or 
even a further choice. He may, if he thinks fit, 
number off the whole list of candidates. That is 
all he will have to do. That is the stupendous in- 



140 DEMOCEACY 

tricacj of the metliod that flattens out the minds of 
Lord Harcourt and Sir Thomas Whittaker. And 
as for the working of it, if you must go into that, 
all that happens is that if your first choice gets more 
votes than he needs for his return, he takes only the 
fraction of your vote that he requires, and the rest 
of the vote goes on to your Number 2. If 2 isn't in 
need of all of it, the rest goes on to 3. And so on. 
That is the i)rofound mathematical mystery, that is 
the riddle beyond the wit of Westminster, that 
overpowers these fine intelligences and sets them 
babbling of " senior wranglers." Each time there 
is a debate on this question in the House, member 
after member hostile to the i)roposal will play the 
ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, 
and will try to confuse others, by deliberately 
clumsy statements of these most elementary ideas. 
Surely if there were no other argument for a change 
of type in the House, these poor knitted brows, 
these public perspirations of the gentry who " can- 
not understand P.R.," should suffice. 

But let us be just; it is not all pretence; the 
inability of Mr. Austen Chamberlain to grasp the 
simple facts before him was undoubtedly genuine. 
He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. 
Burdett Coutts, with the most Christian disregard 
of the nasty things Mr. Burdett Coutts had seemed 
to be saying about the Birmingham caucus from 



DEMOCEACY 141 

which he sprang. He had a childish story to tell 
of how voters would not give their first votes to 
their real preferences, because they would assume 
he " would get in in any case.'' God knows why. 
Of course on the assumption that the voter behaves 
like an idiot, anything is possible. And never ap- 
parentl}^ having heard of fractions, this great Bir- 
mingham leader was unable to understand that a 
voter who puts 1 against a candidate's name votes 
for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagine 
any feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was 
his man. A vote is a vote to this simple rather 
than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible. Bead 
this — 

" Birmingham," he said, referring to a Schedule 
under consideration, " is to be cut into three con- 
stituencies of four members each. I am to have a 
constituency of 100,000 electors, I suppose. How 
many thousand inhabitants I do not know. Every 
effort will he made to prevent any of these electors 
knowing — in fact, it would he impossihle for any 
of them to know — whether they voted for me or 
not, or at any rate whether they effectively voted 
for me or not, or whether the vote which they 
wished to give to me was really diverted to some- 
hody else.'' 

Only in a house of habitually inattentive men 
could any one talk such nonsense without reproof, 



142 DEMOCRACY 

but I look in vain througli Hansard's record of this 
debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. 
Chamberlain's obtuseness. And the rest of his 
speech was a lamentable account of the time and 
trouble he would spend upon his constituents if the 
new method came in. He was the perfect figure of 
the parochially important person in a state of de- 
fensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealed 
to many in the House. 

Of course Lord Harcourt was quite right in say- 
ing that the character of the average House of 
Commons member will be changed by Proportional 
Kepresentation. It will. It will make the election 
of obscure and unknown men, of carpet-bag candi- 
dates who work a constituency as a hawker works 
a village, of local pomposities and village-pump 
" leaders " almost impossible. It will replace such 
candidates by better known and more widely known 
men. It will make the House of Commons so much 
the more a real gathering of the nation, so much 
the more a house of representative men. (Lord 
Harcourt's " faddists and mugwumps.") And it is 
perfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an 
opponent) declares, that Proportional Representa- 
tion means constituencies so big that it will be 
impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work 
them. That is unquestionable. But, mark an- 
other point, it will also make it useless, as Mr. 



DEMOCRACY 143 

Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate 
and work them. All this cultivating and working, 
all this going about and making things right with 
this little jobber here, that contractor there, all 
the squaring of small political clubs and organ- 
izations, all the subscription blackmail and charity 
bribery, that now makes a Parliamentary candi- 
dature so utterly rotten an influence upon public 
life, will be killed dead by Proportional Represen- 
tation. You cannot job men into Parliament by 
Proportional -Representation. Proportional Rep- 
resentation lets in the outsider. It lets in the com- 
mon, unassigned voter who isn't in the local clique. 
That is the clue to nearly all this opposition of the 
politicians. It makes democracy possible for the 
first time in modern history. And that poor man 
of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's imagination, instead 
of cadging about a constituency in order to start 
politician, will have to make good in some more use- 
ful way — as a leader of the workers in their prac- 
tical afiPairs, for example — before people will hear 
of him and begin to believe in him. 

The opposition to Proportional Representation 
of Mr. Sidney Webb and his little circle is a trifle 
more " scientific '' in tone than these naive objec- 
tions of the common run of antagonist, but under- 
lying it is the same passionate desire to keep poli- 
tics a close game for the politician and to bar out 



144 DEMOCEACY 

the politically unspecialized man. There is more 
conceit and less jobbery behind the criticisms of 
this type of mind. It is an opposition based on the 
idea that the common man is a fool who does not 
know what is good for him. So he has to be stam- 
peded. Politics, according to this school, is a sort 
of cattle-driving. 

The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the 
case, Our present electoral system, with our big 
modern constituencies of thousands of voters, leads 
to huge turnovers of political power with a rela- 
tively small shifting of public opinion. It makes a 
mock of public opinion by caricature, and Parlia- 
ment becomes the distorting mirror of the nation. 
Under some loud false issue a few score of thou- 
sands of votes turn over, and in goes this party or 
that with a big sham majority. This the Webbites 
admit. But they applaud it. It gives us, they 
say, " a strong Government." Public opinion, the 
intelligent man outside the House, is ruled out of 
the game. He has no power of intervention at all. 
The artful little Fabian politicians rub their hands 
and say, " ^ow we can get to work with the wires ! 
No one can stop us." And when the public com- 
plains of the results, there is always the repartee, 
" You elected them." But the Fabian psychology 
is the psychology of a very small group of peoi^le 
who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul 



DEMOCRACY 145 

means. It is much easier and more natural to 
serve foul ends by foul means. In practice it is not 
tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among 
the interests and commercial profiteering that work 
the political wires. That is a bad enough state of 
affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragic 
necessity like the present men will not be mocked 
in this way. Life is going to be very intense in the 
years ahead of us. If we go right on to another 
caricature Parliament, with perhaps half a hun- 
dred leading men in it and the rest hacks and 
nobodies, the baffled and discontented outsiders in 
the streets may presently be driven to rioting and 
the throwing of bombs. Unless, indeed, the insur- 
rection of the outsiders takes a still graver form, 
and the Press, which has ceased entirely to be a 
Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adven- 
turous Prime Minister to flout and set aside the 
lower House altogether. There is neither much 
moral nor much physical force behind the House of 
Commons at the present time. 

The argument of the Fabian opponents to Pro- 
portional Representation is frankly that the 
strongest Government is got in a House of half a 
hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of 
the Parliament driven sheep. But the whole mis- 
chief of the present system is that the obscure 
members of Parliament are not sheep; they are a 



146 DEMOCRACY 

crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as 
greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. 
They vote straight indeed on all the main party 
questions, they obey their Whips like sheep then; 
but there is a great bulk of business in Parliament 
outside the main party questions, and obedience is 
not without its price. These are matters vitally 
affecting our railways and ships and communica- 
tions generally, the food and health of the people, 
armaments, every sort of employment, the appoint- 
ment of public servants, the everyday texture of all 
our lives. Then the nobody becomes somebody, 
the party hack gets busy, the rat is in the 
granary. . . . 

In these recent debates in the House of Commons 
one can see every stock trick of the wire-puller in 
operation. Particularly we have the old dodge 
of the man who is " in theory quite in sympathy 
with Proportional Representation, but . . .'' It is, 
he declares regretfully, too late. It will cause 
delay. Difficult to make arrangements. Later on 
perhaps. And so on. It is never too late for a 
vital issue. Upon the speedy adoption of Propor- 
tional Representation depends, as Mr. Balfour 
made plain in an admirable speech, whether the 
great occasions of the peace and after the peace are 
to be handled by a grand council of all that is best 
and most leaderlike in the nation, or whether they 



DEMOCRACY 147 

are to be left to a few leaders, apparently leading, 
but really profoundly swayed by the obscure crowd 
of i)oliticians and jobbers behind them. Are the 
politicians to hamper and stifle us in this supreme 
crisis of our national destinies or are we British 
peoples to have a real control of our own affairs in 
this momentous time? Are men of light and pur- 
pose to have a voice in public affairs or not? Pro- 
portional Eepresentation is supremely a test ques- 
tion. It is a question that no adverse decision in 
the House of Commons can stifle. There are too 
many people now who grasp its importance and sig- 
nificance. Every one who sets a proper value upon 
purity in public life and the vitality of democratic 
institutions will, I am convinced, vote and continue 
to vote across every other question against the 
antiquated, foul, and fraudulent electoral methods 
that have hitherto robbed democracy of three-quar- 
ters of its efficiency. 



XI 

THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF 
DEMOCRACY 

In the preceding chapter I have dealt with the dis- 
cussion of Proportional Representation in the 
British House of Commons in order to illustrate the 
intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs 
have to be handled at the present time, even in a 
country professedly '^ democratic." I have taken 
this one discussion as a sample to illustrate the 
present imperfection of our democratic instrument. 
All over the world, in every country, great multi- 
tudes of intelligent and serious people are now in- 
spired by the idea of a new order of things in the 
world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and 
mutual aid between nation and nation and man and 
man. But, chiefly because of the elementary 
crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly any- 
where at present, except at Washington, do these 
great ideas and this world-wide will find expression. 
Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the 
world President Wilson towers up with an effect 
almost divine. But it is no ingratitude to him to 
say that he is not nearly so exceptional a being 

148 



DEMOCRACY 149 

among educated men as he is among the official 
leaders of mankind. Everywhere now one may 
find something of the Wilson purpose and intel- 
ligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or 
muffled or made ineffective by the political ad- 
vantage of privileged or of violent and adventurous 
inferior men. He is " one of us," but it is his good 
fortune to have got his head out of the sack that is 
about the heads of most of us. In the official world, 
in the world of rulers and representatives and 
" statesmen," he, almost alone, speaks for the 
modern intelligence. 

This general stifling of the better intelligence of 
the world and its release to expression and power, 
seems to me to be the fundamental issue underlying 
all the present troubles of mankind. We cannot 
get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold 
the levers that can kill, imprison, silence and starve 
men. We cannot get on with false government and 
we cannot get on with mob government; we must 
have right government. The intellectual i)eoi)le of 
the world have a duty of co-operation they have too 
long neglected. The modernization of political in- 
stitutions, the study of these institutions until we 
have worked out and achieved the very best and 
most efficient methods whereby the w^hole com- 
munity of mankind may work together under the 
direction of its chosen intelligences, is the common 



150 DEMOCRACY 

duty of every one who has a brain for the service. 
And before everything else we have to realize this 
crudity and imperfection in what we call " democ- 
racy " at the present time. Democracy is still 
chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is an idea; 
for the most part its methods are still to seek. 
And still more is this " League of Free Nations " as 
yet but an aspiration. Let us not underrate the 
task before us. Only the disinterested devotion of 
hundreds of thousands of active brains in school, 
in pulpit, in book and press and assembly can ever 
bring these redeeming conceptions down to the solid 
earth to rule. 

All round the world there is this same obscura- 
tion of the real intelligence of men. In Germany, 
human good will and every fine mind are subor- 
dinated to political forms that have for a mouth- 
piece a Chancellor with his brains manifestly 
addled by the theories of Welt-Politih and the Bis- 
marckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad 
Kaiser. Nevertheless there comes even from Ger- 
many muffled cries for a new age. A grinning 
figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks 
for the best brains in Bulgaria. Yes. We Western 
allies know all that by heart; but, after all, the 
immediate question for each one of us is, "'^ What 
speaks for mef '- So far as official political forms 
go I myself am as ineffective as any right-thinking 



DEMOCRACY 151 

German or Bulgarian could possibly be. I am 
more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohe- 
mian who votes for his nationalist representative. 
Politically I am a negligible item in the con- 
stituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose 
brain we have been peeping. Politically I am less 
than a waistcoat button on thsd quaint figure. 
And that is all I am — except that I revolt. I 
have written of it so far as if it were just a joke. 
But indeed bad and foolish political institutions 
cannot be a joke. Sooner or later they prove them- 
selves to be tragedy. This war is that. It is yes- 
terday's lazy, tolerant " sense of humour " wading 
out now into the lakes of blood it refused to foresee. 
It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day 
the nationalisms, the suspicions and hatreds, the 
cants and policies, and dead phrases that sway men 
represent the current intelligence of mankind. 
They are merely the evidences of its disorganiza- 
tion. Even now we know we could do far better. 
Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and 
right education and this world could mock at the 
poor imaginations that conceived a millennium. 
But we have to get intelligences together, we have 
to canalize thought before it can work and produce 
its due effects. To that end, I suppose, there has 
been a vast amount of mental activity among us 
political " negligibles." For my own part I have 



152 DEMOCKACY 

thought of the idea of God as the banner of human 
unity and justice, and I have made some tentatives 
in that direction, but men, I perceive, have argued 
themselves mean and petty about religion. At the 
word " God " passions bristle. The word " God '' 
does not unite men, it angers them. But I doubt if 
God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no. 
His service is the service of man. This double idea 
of the League of Free Nations, linked with the idea 
of democracy as universal justice, is free from the 
jealousy of the theologians and great enough for 
men to unite upon everywhere. I know how warily 
one must reckon with the s|)ite of the priest, but 
surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all 
the great world religions for their support. The 
world is full now of confused propaganda, propa- 
ganda of national ideas, of traditions of hate, of 
sentimental and degrading loyalties, of every sort 
of error that divides and tortures and slays man- 
kind. All human institutions are made of propa- 
ganda, are sustained by propaganda and perish 
when it ceases; they must be continually explained 
and re-explained to the young and the negligent. 
And for this new world of democracy and the 
League of Free Nations to which all reasonable men 
are looking, there must needs be the greatest of 
all propagandas. For that cause every one must 
become a teacher and a missionary. " Persuade to 



DEMOCRACY 153 

it and make the idea of it and the necessity for it 
plain/' that is the duty of every school teacher, 
every tutor, every religious teacher, every writer, 
every lecturer, every parent, every trusted friend 
throughout the world. For it, too, every one must 
become a student, must go on with the task of mak- 
ing vague intentions into definite intentions, of 
analyzing and destroying obstacles, of mastering 
the ten thousand difficulties of detail. . . . 

I am a man w^ho looks now towards the end of 
life; fifty-one years have I scratched off from my 
calendar, another slips by, and I cannot tell how 
many more of the sparse remainder of possible 
years are really mine. I live in days of hardship 
and privation, when it seems more natural to feel 
ill than well; without holidays or rest or peace; 
friends and the sons of my friends have been killed ; 
the newspapers that come in to my house tell mostly j 
of blood and disaster, of drownings and slaughter- 
ings or of cruelties and base intrigues. Yet never 
have I been so sure that there is a divinity in man 
and that a great order of human life, a reign of 
justice and world-wide happiness, of plenty, power, 
hope, and gigantic creative effort, lies close at hand. ^ 
Even now we have the science and the ability avail- 
able for a universal welfare, though it is scattered 
about the world like a handful of money dropped 
by a child, even now there exists all the knowledge 



154 DEMOCKACY 

that is needed to make mankind universally free 
and human life sweet and noble. We need but the 
faith for it, and it is at hand; we need but the 
courage to lay our hands upon it and in a little space 
of years it can be ours. 



THE END 



Printed in the United States of America. 



THE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author. 



H. G. WELLS' LATEST NOVEL 

The Soul of a Bishop 

By the Author of " Mr. Britling " 

Cloth, $1.50; Leather, $2.50 

*' Its portrait of the Bishop is masterly, it has power and inter- 
est." — New York Times. 

" The book is enormously suggestive." — Philadelphia Publtc 
Ledger. 

"The reader follows with breathless interest the narrative of 
his passionate quest for a real God and a real religion, and the 
poverty and hardship in which this quest involve him and his 
family. . . . But the questions are so frankly what any one of us 
may be asking if the war comes home to us as vitally as it has 
to England, that the reader follows with absorbed interest the 
Bishop's inner struggles and cannot but be stirred to clearer 
thinking. . . . The sincerity and earnestness of this quest of a 
very human man for something that will satisfy the spirit within 
is what one feels and what is convincing. . . . Will help clear the 
mental atmosphere for many. For others it will stir to a work 
much needed at the present time — thinking, that there may be 
the sifting necessary when the new shall appear. . . . The book 
cannot but be helpful to those battling their way through forms 
and creeds and dogmas to pure truth. It is written sincerely and 
earnestly by one who tells frankly what he has found on the 
road." — Philadelphia Telegraph. 

"Era making. ... A tour de force, a power, that will make 
people think, that will, perhaps, start a vast movement. In any 
event it is a vital, a compelling contribution to the life of these 
times. It is the * Robert Elsmere ' of its day. No one who 
would understand the new world forces that have been un- 
leashed and are so feebly known about should pass it by. It is, 
in brief, a book that rhust be resid."— Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

" Utmost dash and brilliancy. ... As brilliant a piece of writ- 
ing as Mr. Wells has ever offered the public; it is entertaining 
from beginning to end. ... It should arouse some serious 
thought even in those who will be most shocked by the attacks 
on dogmatic religion." — New York Sun. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Italy, France and 
Britain at War 

By H. G. wells 

Author of " Mr. Britling Sees It Through,** 
" What Is Coming," etc. 

$1.50 

Here Mr. Wells discusses with an incisiveness and penetrative- 
ness all his own, conditions as he has seen them in three of the 
great countries engaged in the European War. The book is 
divided into four main sections : I : The Passing of the Effigy, 
in which are reviewed certain changing sentiments as regards 
war; II. The War in Italy, taking up The Isonzo Front, The 
Mountain War and Behind the Front; III. The Western War, 
and IV. How People Think About the War, in which are found 
such topics as Do They Really Think at All, The Yielding Paci- 
fist, The Religious Revival and The Social Changes in Progress. 

God the Invisible King 

$i.25A 

Readers of " Mr. Britling Sees It Through " were particularly 
impressed with the religious note which it sounded especially in 
its closing pages. The fundamental ideas of God and of the 
spiritual life of man therein set forth were responsible to no in- 
considerable degree for the tremendous appeal of that story. 
These facts make this volume in which Mr. Wells sets out as 
forcibly and exactly as possible his religious belief, of great 
value. Mr. Wells describes the book himself as one written by a 
man " sympathetic with all sincere religious feelings " and yet a 
man who feels that he must protest against those dogmas which 
have obscured, perverted and prevented the religious life of man- 
kind. The spirit of this book, he says, is like that of a mission- 
ary, who would only too gladly overthrow and smash some 
Polynesian divinity of shark's teeth and painted wood and 
mother-of-pearl. The purpose of the volume like the purpose of 
that missionary is not primarily to shock and insult but to liber- 
ate — the author is impatient with the reverence that stands be- 
tween man and God. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64r-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Mr. Britling Sees It Through 



$i.6o 



"A powerful, strong story. Has wonderful pages . . . gems 
of emotional literature, . . , Nothing could express the whole, 
momentous situation in England and in the United States in so 
few words and such convincing tone. . . . For clear thinking and 
strong feeling, the finest picture of the crises in the Anglo-Saxon 
world that has yet been produced," — Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

" Not only Mr. Wells' best book, but the best book so far pub- 
lished concerning the war." — Chicago Tribune. 

"The most thoughtfully and carefully worked-out book Mr. 
Wells has given us for many a year. ... A veritable cross- 
section of contemporary English life . . . admirable, full of color 
and utterly convincing." — New York Times. 

" A war epic. ... To read it is to grasp, as perhaps never be- 
fore, the state of affairs among those to whom war is the actual 
order of the day. Impressive, true, tender, . . . infinitely moving 
and potent." — Chicago Tribune. 

"For the first time we have a novel which touches the life of 
the last two years without impertinence. This is a really remark- 
able event, and Mr. Wells' book is a proud achievement. . . . The 
free sincerity of this book, with its unfailing distinction of tone, 
is beautiful ... a creation with which we have as yet seen, in 
this country at least, nothing whatever to compare." — London 
Times, 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

What is Coming? 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

This book is a forecast of the consequences of the war. The 
profound psychological changes, the industrial and diplomatic 
developments, the reorganizations in society which are sure to 
follow so great an upheaval of the established institutions, are 
subjects to which Mr. Wells devotes his deep insight into men's 
minds. 

" Wells speaks with remarkable sureness and conviction. . . . 
The voice of the prophet is well tempered and moderate, and the 
nations discussed will do well to heed.'' — Chicago Herald. 

"Of widest interest and consequence are Mr. Wells's study 
and discussion of those present international tendencies, indeed, 
he forecasts, some sort of leaguing together of the nations look- 
ing toward a greater measure of peace than the world has here- 
tofore enjoyed." — New York Times. 

The Research Magnificent 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

Not a book for readers of trashy novels, but one to appeal to 
the intelligence of those who try to look on life with fearless 
eyes, who feel the significance of our own times and see in the 
deeds and dreams of today the aspirations of mankind. 

" A notable novel, perhaps its author's greatest . . . might al- 
most be called an epitome of human existence." — Chicago Her- 
ald. 

"A novel of distinct interest, with a powerful appeal to the 
intellect." — New York Herald. 

" Challenges discussion at a hundred points. It abounds in 
stimulating ideas." — N'ezu York Times. 

"A noble, even a consecrated work ... the crown of his ca- 
reer." — New York Globe. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman 

Cloth, ismo, $1.50 

" Easily the best piece of fiction of the book season." — Graphic. 

" The book has all the attractive Wells whimsies, piquancies, 
and fertilities of thought, and the story is absolutely good to 
read." — New ' York World. 

*' This time Mr. Wells is very little of a socialist, considerably 
of a philosopher, prevailing humorous, and always clever." — The 
Bellman. 

" A new novel by H. G. Wells is always a treat, and ' The Wife 
of Sir Isaac Harman ' will prove no disappointment. . . . The 
book in many ways is one of the most successful this versatile 
sociologist has turned out." — La Follette's Magazine. 



Bealby 



With frontispiece, cloth, i2mo, $1.50 



** * Bealby ' because of its sprightly style and multitude of inci- 
dents is never wearisome." — Boston Transcript. 

" Such an excursion into the realm of fun as Wells has not 
made since ' The History of Mr. Polly.' . . . There are more 
sparkles to the square inch than in any other Wells book." — 
Cincinnati Enquirer. 

" Mr. Wells has written a book as unpolitical as * Alice in Won- 
derland' and as innocent of economics as of astrology. A deli- 
ciously amusing comedy of action swift, violent, and fantastic." 
— New York Times. 

" It is Wells on a vacation, a vacation from the war ; a vacation 
that will be enjoyed by every one who takes it with him." — New 
York Globe. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64r-66 Tifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The War in the Air 

Illustrated, ismo, $1.50 

" It is not every man who can write a story of the improbable 
and make it appear probable, and yet that is what Mr. Wells has 
done in ' The War in the Air.' "— The Outlook. 

"A more entertaining and original story of the future has 
probably never been written." — Town and Country. 

"... Displays that remarkable ingenuity for which Mr. Wells 
is now famous." — Washington Star. 

*' Forcible in the extreme." — Baltimore Sun. 

" It is an exciting tale, a novel military history." — N. Y. Post. 

New Worlds for Old 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

"... is a readable, straightaway account of Socialism; it is 
singularly informing and all in an undidactic way." — Chicago 
Evening Post. 

" The book impresses us less as a defence of Socialism than as 
a work of art. In a literary sense, Mn Wells has never done 
anything better." — Argonaut. 

"... a very good introduction to Socialism. It will attract 
and interest those who are not of that faith, and correct those 
who are." — The Dial. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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